Much Ado about a missing Shakespeare folio and the fetish of private ownership Kate Maltby

William Shakespeare knew the value of a good book.

- Kate Maltby

Prospero, in The Tempest, prized his private library “above my dukedom”.

Ever since the first anthology collection of Shakespeare's plays, known as the First Folio, was published in 1623, collectors have been queuing up to purchase a little of Prospero’s magic. The First Folio ensured the survival of several Shakespeare plays that had never been published individually, The Tempest and Macbeth among them. Of the 750 copies printed, we only know for sure of 235 remaining.

Excitement soared when Sotheby’s announced the upcoming sale of “a set of all four of Shakespeare's Folios”: a First Folio, alongside updated editions published in 1632, 1664 and 1685. Sotheby's advertised these as a “complete set”, last offered as a single auction lot in 1989.

Yet a funny thing happened when I rang Sotheby's and started asking questions on behalf of The Observer. The auction, I was suddenly told, had been cancelled. The listing was scrubbed from the website; the “set” had been privately sold.

This may be cockup rather than conspiracy: two antiquarian sources suggested to me that the private sale had been in the works for some time, and that “the sale should never have been announced” publicly. At last week’s London’s Rare Books Fair, where Stephen Fry and Graham Brady were among the men in suits queuing outside the Saatchi Gallery, the gossip was of furious collectors outmanoeuvred by a megabid.