Bard’s First Folio sells for £7.6m
A COLLECTION of Shakespeare’s plays sold for almost $10m in a record-breaking auction at Christie’s in New York.
The 1623 tome, known as the First Folio, went for $9,978,000 on Wednesday, the highest ever sum paid for a work of literature at auction.
The rare book – one of only six copies known to exist in private hands – easily outstripped its estimate of $4 million to $6 million in the six-minute-long bidding war between three phone bidders.
Antiquarian and rare book collector Stephan Loewentheil purchased the First Folio.
The founder of the 19th Century Rare Book and Photography Shop located in Brooklyn, New York, and Baltimore, Maryland, has been described as a ‘super collector’ and his clients include the White House and the Dalai Lama.
Loewentheil said: “William Shakespeare is incomparably the greatest writer in the English language and one of the most important international cultural influencers in all history. The First Folio is the most important collection of plays ever published and revered throughout the world.
“It is an honor to purchase one of only a handful of complete copies of this epochal volume.”
The book was published in the 17th century by the bard’s friends and fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell. It contains 36 of Shakespeare’s plays including 18 that may otherwise have been lost forever – among the rescued masterpieces are Macbeth, The Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar.
Heminge and Condell were also the first to organise Shakespeare’s plays into the categories of comedies, tragedies and histories.