But, whoever wrote them, the first folio--the plays collected by Heming and Condell, and printed in 1623, at the charges of Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount--is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, volume in all literature. In it not less than twenty dramas, many of which rank among the literary masterpieces of the world, were brought together for the first time. Is it any wonder, therefore, that the first folio of Shakespeare, Shakespeare! "not our poet, but the world's," is so highly regarded? The condition and location of practically every copy in the world is known and recorded. Originally the price is supposed to have been a guinea, and a century passed before collectors and scholars realized that it, like its author, was not for an age, but for all time. In 1792 a copy brought £30, and in 1818 "an original copy in a genuine state" changed hands at £121; but what shall be said of the price it fetches to-day?
When, a few years ago, a Philadelphia collector paid the record price of almost twenty thousand dollars, people unlearned in the lore of books expressed amazement that a book should bring so large a sum; but he secured one of the finest copies in existence, known to collectors as the Locker-Lampson copy, which had been for a short time in the possession of William C. Van Antwerp, of New York, who, unluckily for himself and for the book-collecting world, stopped collecting almost as soon as he began. This splendid folio has now found a permanent resting place in the Widener Memorial Library at Harvard. It is no doubt inevitable that these notable books should at last come to occupy honored niches in great mausoleums, as public libraries really are, but I cannot escape the conviction that Edmond de Goncourt was right when he said in his will:--
"My wish is that my drawings, my prints, my curiosities, my books--in a word these things of art which have been the joy of my life--shall not be consigned to the cold tomb of a museum, and subjected to the stupid glance of the careless passer-by; but I require that they shall all be dispersed under the hammer of the auctioneer, so that the pleasure which the acquiring of each one of them has given me shall be given again, in each case, to some inheritor of my own tastes."