The Folger Shakespeare Library

Summary

“Whatever you do, Buy”, urged Heminges and Condell in 1623 in their appeal “To the great Variety of Readers” of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, never dreaming that in the distant land of the American ‘salvages’ a lover of their friend Shakespeare’s plays would one day own seventy-nine copies of the First Folio. Not elsewhere since Jaggard, Blount, Smethwicke and Aspley, at whose charges the book was printed, first offered it for sale three centuries ago, have four walls contained so many copies.

The man who gave such heed to Heminges and Condell and bought editions of Shakespeare more assiduously and successfully than any other was Henry Clay Folger. He was a lineal descendant of Peter Folger, who about 1635 emigrated from Norwich and settled ultimately on Nantucket Island in New England. Folger's parents lived in Brooklyn, where he was born on 18 June 1857. As a student in Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn, he manifested an interest in Shakespeare that increased during his undergraduate years at Amherst College under the stimulus of Emerson's Essays and his “Remarks at the Celebration of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Shakespeare”. There was no thought at that time of a Shakespeare Library, but a Philadelphia edition of the Works which a brother gave him at Christmas in 1875 may be regarded as the first item in his collection.