Free The Shakespeare Thefts by Eric Rasmussen Page A

Johnstoun who had owned a First Folio in the 1600s. That First Folio was sold by Christie’s in June 1980, purchased by the book dealer Quaritch for £80,000 and acquired by Meisei that same year. It now resides in the library’s famous vault.
    William Johnstoun annotated the margins of the book heavily. All of the white space is filled with his writing; mainly he liked to sum up the thematic import of passages with pithy sayings. For instance, at the head of the scene of
The Merchant of Venice
in which Antonio explains that he must borrow money from Shylock, Johnstoun writes “spending beyond a man’s means.”
    There is also something more remarkable. On the page where Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson wrote his appreciative verses about the engraved portrait of Shakespeare, someone has written in the margin “upon the memory of my uncle.”
    My uncle
. Meaning that Ben Jonson was related to the Johnstoun family!
    So, I thought, here’s William Johnstoun, an early fan of William Shakespeare. He has a connection to Ben Jonson. What are the chances that this family really
did
own a portrait of Shakespeare?
    On that day, at that ill-attended auction, I gazed on that painting that no relative would even store inan attic. I looked at the man in the painting
in the eyes
. And damn, if they didn’t look like Shakespeare’s. For me, simply owning a four-hundred-year-old oil painting seemed pretty amazing. The Shakespeare link was an interesting
possibility
. I told myself I was buying the portrait for its own sake. But honestly, those intelligent eyes… . Nationalism, a chain on a shelf … not even a bullet would have stopped me from making the winning £1,000 bid.

CHAPTER NINE
THE BIBLIOMANIAC
    The Sir Thomas Phillipps Copy I will have such revenges on you both, That all the world shall—I will do such things—What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be The terrors of the earth
.
    —
Shakespeare’s
King Lear
    Book collectors, as a class, are known for their eccentricities. And yet, even among this decidedly quirky group, Sir Thomas Phillipps stands out. In 1798, when Phillipps was all of six years old, he already owned 110 books. He is said to have declared, “I wish to have
one copy of every Book in the World!!!”
1 —and, true to his word, he spenthis life attempting to fulfill this ambition. When Phillipps walked into a bookshop, he often purchased everything in stock; when he received catalogs from book dealers, he would buy every item listed; he would send agents to book auctions with instructions to secure every lot (much to the dismay of representatives from the British Museum who were trying to build the nascent British Library but were routinely outbid by Phillipps).
    It is safe to say that the man was a bibliomaniac.
    Sir Thomas was not born into privilege—he was, in fact, the illegitimate son of a textile manufacturer and a barmaid—but he was born at the right time, as his success as a collector owed something to the glut of books and manuscripts that came onto the market owing to the dispersal of the monastic libraries in the wake of the French Revolution.
    In the Phillipps estate, Middle Hill, sixteen of the mansion’s twenty-one rooms were used only for the storage of books. Phillipps’s fear of fire was so great that he commissioned a carpenter to craft specially designed coffinlike boxes with drop-down doors on the sides in which to store his collection. By his reasoning, the books could thus easily be carried to safety in an emergency. That the flammability of wooden containers did not concern him is a cause for wonder; in any case, visitors frequently remarked on the spooky atmosphere at Middle Hill, since it was filled with hundreds of these“coffins,” lined in rows, and stacked four or five high in each room.
    Phillipps also feared that beetles (and, to be fair, they infested the estate) would eat his books if another food source were not readily available. To avoid this problem,