Education: Folger to the U.S.

Folger to the U. S.

The writer most revered by the U. S. is adopted. He never visited America although he undoubtedly heard a great deal about it and was one of the first to make use of one of its first exports, tobacco. When you get off the train at his home town you are immediately faced with a large U. S. cigaret advertisement. In the last century Phineas Taylor Barnum tried to buy his birthplace. Retired Champion Fisticuffer James Joseph (“Gene”) Tunney professes to admire his works above those of all other authors. Last week, by the will of a retired tycoon —Henry Clay Folger, onetime (1911-23) president of Standard Oil Co. of New York—the U. S. acquired a collection of the works of William Shakespeare “not even surpassed by the British Museum,” also an imposing museum for it in Washington, D. C., near the national Capitol, also $10,000,000 for further Shakespearean research.

After he was graduated from Amherst in 1879, Tycoon Folger divided his time between writing treatises on petroleum and monographs on Shakespeare, and making more money to buy more early Shakespeare editions. His hobby he shared with his wife. Together they amassed 25,000 rare volumes of the works of Elizabethan dramatists. Until his death the precise worth of this collection, now stored in Manhattan, was intentionally kept vague so that his reputation as a collector would not handicap him in making purchases.

The Folger Shakespeare Memorial, now abuilding on Grant Row between the Congressional Library and the site of the new Supreme Court building, will contain reading rooms, exhibition rooms and a courtyard created in the image of a 16th Century English theatre. Cost: $1,500,000.

Among the items, once the property of bewhiskered, un-Big Businesslike Mr. Folger, are: the only known copy of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works; a copy of Titus Andronicus published in 1594; many an early quarto; one of the three existing copies of the second edition of Hamlet* Amherst’s Board of Trustees will administer the $10,000,000 fund, for which service the college will receive $250,000. When the Memorial is completed. Amherst’s trustees will take whatever steps seem necessary to finance Shakespearean investigation and disseminate knowledge of Shakespeare.

*Another copy is at the Huntington Library (San Gabriel, Calif.), the third at the Elizabethan Club of Yale.