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Jul. 11--This week in London, a first edition of William Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623, will be sold at auction. Known as a First Folio of Shakespeare, it could fetch $6 million.
This copy of "Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies" was one of 750 identical volumes containing 36 plays, published by the playwright's friends seven years after his death.
The significance of his friends' act was to preserve 18 plays that Shakespeare had never published. Without the First Folio, the world would not know of "Macbeth," "Julius Caesar," "Two Gentlemen of Verona," "Twelfth Night," "All's Well That Ends Well," "The Comedy of Errors," "Antony and Cleopatra," "The Tempest," "Henry VIII," "The Taming of the Shrew" or "As You Like It," among others.
About 250 First Folios have survived. The one to be presented Thursday at Sotheby's New Bond Street auction house is among the finest in existence, containing mostly original pages and still in its mid-17th century calf binding.
The remaining First Folios, mostly incomplete and augmented with facsimile pages, are found worldwide.
One of them belongs to the people of California.
It's a crimson-bound volume decorated with gilded trim that can be found at the California State Library's Sutro Library on the campus of San Francisco State University. About half of its pages are original, printed in 1623, and the rest are facsimiles, probably added to the book in the mid-to-late 1800s. The margins were trimmed very close to the printed text, further diminishing the volume's value.
But it's a treasure nonetheless.
"This is one of the great highlights of any distinguished library," says Gary Kurutz, curator of the State Library's special-collections archive. "The King James Bible and the Shakespeare First Folio were the two greatest influences on the English language as we know it today. The First Folio preserves the text of arguably the most famous writer in the history of the English language."
The First Folio came to the State Library by way of Adolph Sutro, a 19th century San Francisco developer and the city's one-time mayor who made fortunes in both the California gold fields and Nevada's Comstock Lode. He devised the famous Sutro Tunnel, which drained and ventilated Nevada's silver mines, allowing miners to bring out the ore.
Sometime in the 1880s, Sutro set out to establish a general- research library for San Francisco, traveling to Europe and buying large book collections at auction. He acquired the Shakespeare First Folio around 1883.
"He bought up all kinds of English literature," Kurutz says. "Having the First Folio of Shakespeare is one of the jewels in your crown. He also had a First Folio of Ben Jonson (who wrote the verse appearing opposite the title page in the Shakespeare First Folio) and a second edition of Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales.' He recognized the Shakespeare First Folio as a hallmark of English civilization."
Sutro died in 1898 after amassing about 300,000 volumes but before he could establish his library. About half of his collection was lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, but the Shakespeare First Folio was housed in a Montgomery Street structure that withstood the flames.
"There is a famous story that his daughter, Emma Sutro Merritt, to whom he left his library, was so worried about the Folio being lost that she ran down there and took this out of the burning building, but there is nothing to prove that," Kurutz says.
Sutro's daughter bequeathed her father's remaining books to the California State Library in 1915, with the stipulation that they remain in the city and county of San Francisco. The Sutro Library was established to house his surviving collection.
The Shakespeare First Folio is kept in a vault at the Sutro Library, usually out of sight except to serious researchers. Its last public appearance in Sacramento was six years ago, when the State Library celebrated the 150th anniversary of its founding with an exhibit at the Crocker Art Museum.
Shakespeare reportedly had no interest in publishing his plays in his lifetime, although 18 made their way into print in small "quartos," which were the size of modern paperback novels. John Heminges and Henry Condell, friends who performed his work as part of the King's Men company, decided to publish 36 of his plays in 1623.
Without the First Folio, says Peter Lichtenfels, who teaches Shakespeare at UC Davis and is associated with the Globe Theatre in London, "the world wouldn't be as rich, the breadth wouldn't be as much, but (Shakespeare) would still have a huge impact, because we do have other plays by him.
"There is no better playwright in the world than Shakespeare, and it's simply because of the breadth of his humanity, his humor. Because we have (the First Folio), the language is richer."
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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