82 Folios

Whoa, I cried out. If someone robbed that joint, they could make $246 million dollars!

Now, I’m not an advocate of crime. I think I had to stay after school one time in grammar school, and I got high school detention – “jugged,” we called it – once. Over twenty-five years of driving, I’ve only had to pay a couple of traffic tickets. So I’m not Dillinger. Nor a Dillinger wannabe.

No, what I was thinking of more was, this would make a great novel. Or a great movie.

Last week I wrote about the First Folio, the 1623 posthumous compilation of most of Shakespeare’s plays by two of his dear friends. Costing about $400 dollars by today’s standards, each could earn up to $3 million on the auction block. Among the 300 or so surviving editions, there is one place on the planet where there are more First Folios sitting together in one spot than anywhere else. 82 of them, to be precise. (Well, as precise as this literary archaeology gets; not all folios are complete.)

Hit that place, and you could make a fortune on the black market.

Sure, like a Van Gogh heist, you won’t see the money right away, and you won’t realize full market value of your stolen art. If you were able to pull a Steve McQueen and make off with all them folios, you’d have to wait a good long while and maybe only sell one at a time, maybe for a million a piece. Possibly less.

Sometime during the Depression, one of the heirs to a coffee fortune and head-honcho of Standard Oil, a Mr. Folger, began looking about for a neat place to house his vast collection of Shakespeareana. In 1934, two years after he died, the Folger Shakespeare Library was established in Washington, DC, in sight of the Capital Building. Folger’s folios were stored there, and the library acquired a few more over the years. It’s also the largest repository for literary documents pre-1750 in the United States. Today it serves as a clearinghouse for all intellectual things Shakespeare, a combined museum and training facility for bardologists.

(Note: the above paragraph is culled from an admittedly sieve-y memory. If you want hard, solid facts, consult wikipedia. I just give the romanticized version.)

Now, I have no clue as to the security of the Folger Shakespeare Library, but I’m sure it’s bad*ss. Maybe not as high-tech as those places Tom Cruise robs in those Mission Impossible flicks, maybe not all lasered-up for Catherine Zeta-Jones to writhe through. But it must be realistically impressive. Because, other artifacts notwithstanding, there’s $246 million dollars worth of First Folios stashed in that establishment.

So Mr. McQueen assembles his team: the safe-cracker, the electronics jammer, the muscle who’s good with a gun, the pretty dame to stir up a distraction. Steve will drive the getaway car. There’s an old, semi-effeminate aristocrat who’ll fence the folios, one at a time, three or four a year, to similar semi-effeminate artistocrats who want them for their private libraries. Only question is, will McQueen and the dame get to Mexico, or does he get popped yards from the border.

Me, I have a sister-in-law who lives in D.C. Next time we’re down there (which, regrettably, isn’t that often, though the wife and I used to live in the area), I have a mission: to scope out the Folger’s Shakespeare Library. I’ll only enter during business hours, and the only tools I’ll carry are the tools of my trade – a notebook and a pair of pens.

I can’t think of a better way to spend the afternoon. My wife and kids can, so I’ll be all alone with my thoughts and my desire to get to know the greatest English poet and playwright to ever have lived.