The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios

The blurbs on the back cover give the game away: "page-turner," "travelogue," "hugely enjoyable," "brisk and amusing." It almost sounds like a summer read, if your idea of a great summer includes iced tea, a towel, sun block and Shakespeare. Well, I'm a major Shakespeare junkie and, yes, that's my idea of a good summer. Rasmussen and his team have completed a catalog raisonne of every existing (200 some) copy of the First Folio (which ran to a printing of about 750). Every detail of each copy is painstakingly recorded, covering subjects like provenance, cover/condition, damage, replacement, forgery, changes in the text from copy to copy, marginalia (!!!), etc. It's mind boggling. And THAT is NOT THIS BOOK. This book is a collection of the human interest, detective stories Rasmussen and his team collected along the way. Copies we seem to know everything about except where they are; copies we know next to nothing about except that they exist. Institutions that refuse to protect their copies. (You can get about $6 million for one these days. C'mon now!) Thieves who think they can rip off the cover or remove an owner's ex libris and pass a copy off as newly discovered. Generally, I am a big fan of books about art forgery and art theft because, to me, those topics contain everything good and bad that makes us human. So I always come away from a book like this with a sense of gratitude for so many more things to think about my fundamental humanity. And since I'm reflecting on those things in the presence of my bud, Will, all the better.

Eric Rasmussen, along with Anthony James West and several other researchers, has spent years tracking down and thoroughly cataloging every copy of Shakespeare's First Folio -- 232 are known to exist. Every marginal note, bookmark, stain, and so on has now been recorded. As Rasmussen notes, one unintended consequence of this effort is that stealing a First Folio with the hope of later selling it as a newly discovered copy is now less likely to be profitable because all known copies are so well documented. (Although, Rasmussen also notes that there is a possibility that thieves will now be motivated to more extensively mutilate a stolen copy to remove any identifying marks!)This book consists of 20 short chapters that recount just about every interesting anecdote that is known about the First Folio. The title is a bit misleading because most of the anecdotes don't have to do with theft. The book is a quick read at only 186 pages set with a large typeface. I can't imagine that someone with an interest in Shakespeare, or in book collecting more generally, won't enjoy it.

This is a really well written non fiction. It reads like an adventure novel and at the same time offers a treasure trove of interesting facts, mostly not immediately useful unless you want to wow your friends at the next get together or are looking to buy a First Folio. Who would have thought that there is so much intrigue around Shakespeare's writing. My only surprise is that it hasn't been picked up for a movie yet.

Considering the expertise of the author and the excellent work he has done in other books this title is shockingly shallow and dull. It reads more like a poorly rendered preface to the larger reference work he mentions several times in the narrative. He covers a topic that is of great interest to me and to many others but he makes it dull. In the acknowledgements he admits that with this book he set out to write a 'trade book' like Shaperio or Greenblatt; he did not succeed. Most of the anecdotes (and really that's all there are in in the book) are vague and boil down to: another book went missing and nobody knows where. A lot is merely filler; pages are dedicated to the fact that people who buy folios dies as if that were some earth shaking conclusion. People who buy any book eventually die. The book is disappointing and the writing is weak. Nothing like the excellent work he's done in the RSC volumes.

With the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death , there is a tour of first folios , stopping in each of 50 states . So reading some of the interesting stories that color the history of the legendary volume, printed not quite 400 years ago, makes for a great read, with our state and cities hosting beginning as the book was finished. Cannot say it would hold as much value for a more general reader , but in my circumstances definitely a five-star read.

Much Ado About . . . very little.

Well organized and written and the information was presented in a very readable manner. I was entertained and not bored.

Fun reading rather than true scholarship.

I feel some of the earlier reviews of this book are rather unfair. It doesn't set out to be Great Literature and surely, to be heading up a venture as off the wall as this, the author could be expected to be a bit eccentric. He isn't a professional writer -- he's an academic. I didn't mind his aside about his own rather optimistic purchase of Shakespeariana; after all, he told the anecdote against himself.It is a slight volume and I would judge that how much you like it depends on how interested you are in Shakespeare's First Folio. There was a time in my life (just before Finals) when I thought if I never heard another word on the subject, it would be no hardship at all -- but in fact I rather enjoyed this. Good for reading on a plane or a train, easy to pick up and put down. Not a literary prize winner, but fine for what it is.

Very anecdotal and not particularly scholarly but a pleasant intellectually undemanding read. The author missed out by not producing something a little more substantial. Will go to Oxfam fairly soon.

"Book collectors, as a class, are known for their eccentricities." So says the author of this quirky book, and then goes on to prove it in a way that had me smiling and chuckling throughout.From every page of this book, it's obvious that Eric Rasmussen has not only an in-depth scholarly knowledge of his subject, but also a passionate enthusiasm for it - an enthusiasm he wants us to share. He and his team of researchers have spent the last decade cataloguing all the remaining copies of Shakespeare's First Folio that they could lay their hands on. Along the way, Rasmussen has collected a fund of stories about thefts and miraculous recoveries, family feuds, frauds and forgeries. For instance, did you know that the pope once "stole" a First Folio from actress Dorothy Tutin? If you want the rest of that story, you'll need to read the book!Told in a light-hearted style, nonetheless the book is packed full of interesting information about Shakespeare and the actors he worked with, 17th century printing and publishing, and the obsession shown by book collectors over the centuries. Even the notes at the end are full of little anecdotes that add to the overall enjoyability of the book. This will be an ideal gift for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare or, indeed, in books generally. I know several of my family and friends will be receiving it this Christmas. Highly recommended.

Other reviews of this book are terrific and being an enthusiastic amateur scholar of Shakespeare I had very high expectations of this study. What a disappointment!1. It is very poor value despite being a hardback, being just over standard paperback size. Its use of a very large font and over-generous spacing of the text makes it a very short read.2. Some arch Americanisms mar the text. See for example on page 128 the phrase 'we haven't gotten a look'. The general tone and quality of the writing is American Readers Digest.3. The author probably is a leading expert on the First Folio but this book does not show much sign of expertise or scholarship.How do I get my money back from Amazon?Andrew James Constantine, Devon, England - 3 August 2012.

If you're one of those people and looking to steal a very rare book, whatever you do, never, and this should be underlined and repeated, never, steal a Shakespeare First Folio. Not because stealing a Shakespeare First Folio is necessarily that hard; if the heists detailed in Eric Rasmussen's The Shakespeare Thefts are an example, it's actually a relatively straightforward process to steal a Shakespeare First Folio. Not quite sticking a Harry Potter under your jumper in WH Smiths, but security in some places has been strangely loose and based on much trust between a reference library and the person purporting to be an academic.No, the problem with stealing a Shakespeare First Folio is that you'll never be able to sell it on. Well, you might, on the black market, assuming you have the right contacts, but only for a fraction of what it's actually worth. The problem is, at least for a prospective thief is that not only do Rasmussen and a team of researchers have a record of the location for all the couple of hundred or so Shakespeare First Folios in existence, they've also tirelessly created a descriptive record of them all so that if a Folio is stolen and then another Folio appears on the market, they can tell relatively quickly if they're one and the same.Soon this data will been published. It's in The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Index and although - based on the section quoted in this supplementary book - it's fairly dry read it also provides added security to those owners who've agreed to have their Folio recorded. You may have seen the documentary on television last year, the story of how Raymond Rickett Scott carried a Folio into the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington claiming to have bought it in Cuba, and although it was missing its covers and first pages, they were very quickly able to identify it as the copy stolen from Durham University ten years before.The Shakespeare Thefts is a cautionary tale and there are numerous other examples of less educated thieves who've fallen into the same trap of assuming that stealing a Shakespeare First Folio is just like any other rare book. But Rasmussen seeks to underscore the point by revealing that it's not simply the description of each book which identifies it, but it's provenance. They've been able to identify who originally purchased each of these Folios and the book's journey through time, some simply sitting on a shelf in the intervening years, some having escaped war zones, some even having apparently saved lives, taking a bullet themselves.All of which is very exciting, but the book itself is something of a curate's egg, not quite sure what it wants to be. On the one hand it is about the thefts of the folios and on the other it is about their history. Then there's a third hand about the actual processes of recording the folios and some anecdotes about that and the inevitable forth about those Folios out of reach, locked away in private vaults with orders for them not to be seen the frustration of which Rasmussen returns to on a number of occasions. He returns to a few subjects on a number of occasions even repeating the same information. This is a messy book.Perhaps a more schematic approach would have helped. The Descriptive Index promises to have full provenance details and perhaps a better approach here would have been to simply pick the more interesting Folios and offered the story of those with an anecdote about its recording as this attempts to do in a few chapters. But that would also have a required a slightly more academic tone and the other slightly problem is Rasmussen (who amongst other things co-edited the RSC Complete Works with Jonathan Bate) is attempting to write for that market and the popular history section which in some cases makes it very readable but in others slightly insubstantial. I managed to finish the book in about two hours.As it stands, what is here is never less than enthralling and the slightly random approach does give it the tone of an extended after dinner speech or spending an entertaining evening in the office of an academic after hours as they regale you with war stories or fishing tales, the Folio destroyed in fires or nibbled by rats. There's an excellent short chapter about the preparation of the text for the recent RSC Hamlet with David Tennant, the production we didn't see, and the appendix is as clear a description of the process of the original publication of the folios as I've ever read. Approach it in the right spirit and this is a thoroughly entertaining read.