With only 235 copies known to exist, is auctioning the great Bard’s first folio now a multimillion dollar business?
By: Ringo Bones
Published back in 1623, seven years after the great Bard’s death, this was the first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s plays. The edition sold on Wednesday, October 14, 2020, was the first complete copy to go under the hammer at Christie’s since 2001, when one fetched for $6.1m (£4.9m) – the previously held record price for an auctioned Shakespeare’s First Folio. About 235 copies of the book exist, but only a handful of complete versions are known to exist and most of them are held in private hands.
The copy auctioned at Christie’s on Wednesday was previously owned by Mills College in Oakland, California – a private college that owned its complete copy of Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio since th1960s. Unfortunately, the identity of the buyer was not immediately known at the time when the auction was finalized. Auction house Christie’s had conservatively estimated the value of the Mills College owned First Folio at between $4 million to $6 million.
What’s so special about the Mills College’s copy of the First Folio is that it is one of the only of the handful of the 235 existing copies of the book that is complete. One previously owned by Oxford University was sold for £3.5 million back in 2003. Only five or six of the 235 copies are documented to be fully complete copies and all of them are in private hands. Shakespeare’s First Folio was the first printed book to incorporate 36 of his plays together – 18 of which would otherwise not have been recorded. If the First Folio was never published, there would otherwise not have been copies of such plays as Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar and The Tempest.
