– A pope’s awkward mistake –
Rasmussen told AFP his favourite story, which he stumbled upon in his hunt for First Folios, was of the time the Royal Shakespeare Company took their copy to Rome for a papal performance.
“After they performed they brought it out and the pope was supposed to bless it. He hadn’t been adequately briefed so he accepted it as a gift. You can almost see the tug of war going on on stage.”
In Japan, where many copies were snapped up in the 70s and 80s, he once found a copy with a musket bullet piercing it all the way to the tragedy Titus Andronicus.
“Somebody had to be holding it up,” said Rasmussen, speculating that it may even have saved somebody’s life.
“We find copies that have wine stains on them, that have been left open and have cat prints across them. It humanises them in a way… they are not just priceless artefacts.”
Rasmussen said the largest number of First Folios, 82 in total, were snapped up by American Henry Clay Folger and are now housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.
He explains that the First Folio was the only source for about half of Shakespeare’s plays such as Macbeth and Julius Caesar, that had never been published in his lifetime.
He said people began to “fetishise” the work and in the 19th century it became the must-have collector’s item for the super-wealthy.
In 2006 Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen bought one for $6 million dollars.
Saint-Omer library director Francoise Ducroquet said that while most First Folio copies were valued at between 2.5 and five million euros, the damaged version found in her library would probably be worth less.
However she said the newest discovery would be stored in the library’s safe with other precious items.
Saint-Omer is an ancient port town that bustled with economic and cultural activity in the Middle Ages. Its library has 800 important manuscripts, 230 incunabula – books printed in Europe before 1501 – as well as a Gutenberg Bible.
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