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Big deal for the Bard

Charlotte Higgins

£2.5 million Shakespeare first folio sets U.K. sale record

London: It was the studious-looking young fellow with the sweater patched at the elbows, shaking with tension, who got the Shakespeare first folio. The hammer price of £2.5 million was the highest achieved by a first folio at auction in the U.K.

Bidding started at £1.6 million at Sotheby's in London on Thursday. At £2.5 million, bids abruptly halted, and the auctioneer broke the tension by declaring the book "great value" (the top-end of the estimate was £3.5 million).

The young man in the patched sweater had been standing at the back of the saleroom, apparently communicating with the auctioneer via enormously eloquent blinks. Afterwards he said only that he was acting for Simon Finch, a rare-book dealer based in Mayfair, who in turn was representing a buyer whose identity remains unknown. "The purchaser has got a great deal," was the response of Stephen Roe, head of the book department for Sotheby's Europe.

The first folio of Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is one of the most important books in the English language. Half of his plays remained unpublished at his death in 1616, and were brought out posthumously in this book. Without the first folio, we would lack 18 Shakespeare plays, including As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Macbeth. Seven hundred and fifty copies were printed, and about 230 are still in existence. Of these, 147 are in the U.S. and 46 in Britain, including five in the British Library.

The auctioned copy was sold by Dr. Williams' Library in Bloomsbury, London. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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