I received a wonderful email yesterday from illustrator Sophie Blackall. She kindly agreed to let me share that email, and her photos:
I thought you might be as interested in this as I was. Last week my friend and I went up to Williamstown to see the Shakespeare folios which are in the Williams library. My friend went to school at Williams, but never knew they had the first, second, third, and fourth folios in their collection until he read about the theft of the first in 1940. Anyway, he’s a playwright, writing a play about books, and wanted to go and see them in the flesh, so he made an appointment and I went along to look over his shoulder and smell the pages. We were in the room all day, with all sorts of other treasures (first edition Pliny and Audobon), and there was a blizzard outside, and I began to wonder if we’d be snowed in and have to spend the night in the rare book room.
At some point the head librarian (both librarians were pleasingly owl-like) began to tell the story of the robbery. A young scholar came (with what were later revealed to be phony references from an imaginary professor) to study the folio and gave every appearance of taking notes and being “scholarly.” When the librarian left the room for a minute, he took quick measurements of the book and the case. The next day he returned to study some more, and the librarian who was there on her own, felt comfortable enough to leave him alone while she went to the bathroom. At one o’clock the miscreant told her he was going out to lunch and would be back in an hour. He never returned. It took her several hours to realize the loss.
He had gone home the first night, taken a copy of Reynard the Fox and sawn it down to match the Shakespeare dimensions. The next day while the librarian was in the loo, he’d swapped Goethe for Shakespeare. The fellow and his conspirators, none of whom had actually finished high school, found the folio too hot to sell, and in a series of complicated double-crossings, they turned on each other. Eventually our man turned himself in and the folio was returned unscathed. The librarian casually mentioned he still had the copy of the sawn Reynard the Fox, and I was so excited he went and dug it out. I confess I was far more interested in this mutilated, strange, beautiful, story-laden book than the Shakespeare. The pictures are exquisite and unsettling and something about the missing third makes them even more intriguing. I want to track down a copy for myself now. But the urge to saw it down would be overwhelming.
See more images from Reynard (not from this copy!) and read about the book at BibliOdyssey, who covered it in 2007.
All illustrations (circa 1840s) by Wilhelm von Kaulbach for Goethe’s Reynard the Fox. “Cropping” done by Shakespeare folio thief in 1940. Photos by Sophie Blackall.
A huge thank you to Sophie for this post. See her own illustration work on her website, etsy shop, blog, and her Missed Connections project.
