The Shakespeare Thefts (13 page)

One team member who would love to get a look at that copy is Don Bailey. A meticulous examiner of First Folios, he once found a hair in a copy of the folio that is housed at Columbia University in New York. The librarian on duty that day was not impressed: Basically, the response was: “You found a hair. Good for you.”

However, Don noted that a substance had gotten onto the paper
before
it was printed; you could see the indentation of the type on the substance and through the substance was the hair. To Don, this means that someday science will be such that someone can analyze the hair and then be able to tell us something more about the printers of the First Folio. One wonders what a DNA analysis of employees at Jaggard’s print shop, or of one of the Jaggards themselves, would reveal.

Finding pieces of former owners (small ones, not gory ones) in old books is not that uncommon. I have a friend who owns one of John Donne’s eyelashes. You read that right. There was a manuscript in the poet’s hand, there was a blot of ink, into it fell an eyelash, and the ink dried.

A volume purchased by Henry Clay Folger (that now resides in the Folger Shakespeare Library) contains
a wonderful memory of human engagement: a rust transfer created by a pair of spectacles left in the volume for a significant period of time. One can imagine the owner reading
The Winter’s Tale
, leaving the glasses in the book as a place marker, and then failing to return to it for quite some time—if ever.

Another copy at the Folger, believed to have been owned by a sheriff of Worcester in 1782, contains mirror images of a pair of scissors that were left in the volume. Were they left behind by a careless binder, or used as a bookmark? Perhaps there was a budding scrap-booker in the family who was foiled? Any scenario is possible.

Yet another copy in the Folger, originally owned by John Hacket, Bishop of Lichfield in the 1630s and thought to have remained in the possession of his descendants at Moxhull Hall, Warwickshire, until 1870, bears a key-shaped rust mark in
Romeo and Juliet
. Was the bishop a secret fan of the star-crossed lovers? Did he hide the key to his heart in this volume? Or did he think a book of plays was the last place anyone would think to find an illicit key that he
needed
to keep hidden?

Trapped objects—be they scissors, key, or hair—can reveal something of a book’s journey. For this reason, Don still cannot believe that the librarian was unimpressed with the follicle and that when he went back to Columbia a year later to take another look at the same
volume, there was no note such as:
HAIR TRAPPED IN A BLOT OF INK, CIRCA
1623.

Another way owners leave themselves in the pages of the folios is by writing on the blank spaces in the margins. Don’s interpretation of a bit of marginalia that he found in the First Folio at the Newberry Library in Chicago is particularly moving. The manuscript annotation “Ann Park is” is written in an early hand above this verse from
Two Gentlemen of Verona
.

Most scholars who have examined this folio assume that “Ann Park” was at one time an owner of the volume. But the annotation “Ann Park is” is placed immediately above the line of play “That I did love.” Don’s poignant interpretation is that “this was somebody who had once been beloved, and no longer was.”

Robert Wynn of Bodysgallen Hall near Llandudno, North Wales, owned this volume at one time. This fact
can be deduced from an autograph that appears on the title page, just below Shakespeare’s portrait: “Robert Wynn Bodescallan.” No one has been able to trace Ann Park.

Another team member, Lara Hansen, found a remarkable bit of marginalia in her favorite First Folio, one owned by a private collector in northern Virginia. This folio boasts one of the longest single tracks of ownership, from the time Dr. Daniel Williams acquired it in 1699 to when it was sold to its current owner just a few years ago. The threat of theft had become so serious and the liability so great that the London library that had held this copy for over two centuries determined it could no longer afford the costs of “protecting and insuring it,”
¹
and auctioned it off in 2006 for $5.2 million.

Dr. Williams was a Welsh Presbyterian minister and theologian but may have had an impish side. On the final page of
Hamlet
, someone has written, “I desire the reader’s mouth to kiss the writer’s arse.”

I own a Ben Jonson Folio from 1692 that once may have been owned by Charles Dickens and his family. Pencil notations on the list of players for
Every Man in His Humor
detail the cast of a benefit performance undertaken by Charles Dickens, his family, and friends on July 28, 1847 in Liverpool—including the role assigned to Charles Dickens, who played Captain Bobadil. It means something to me, this personalizing, the
“association” (as it’s known in the book trade) between the book and its previous owners.

As it stands, we haven’t gotten a look at the private copy in Tokyo, and it may be that we never will. I try to keep my wits about me when I think of the possibility of failure. And I try not to pull out my hair; or, if I do, I try to do it over that Ben Jonson folio. Who knows how baffled future DNA researches will be when they locate my hair?
He was not of an age but for all time!

The Williams College Copy

I’d stay healthy if I stayed away from Buffalo
.

—First Folio thief threatened by his accomplice

The case files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) record that “in the early part of 1940, four Albany, New York, criminals engineered a plot worthy of the great dramatist, William Shakespeare himself.”
¹
William John Kwiatkowski (alias Thomas E. Cleary, William Cleary,
William Potter, Elmer Potter, Walter Grelanka, Dr. Kent, H. Thompson Rich, George Kock, and Douglas Coleman)
²
specialized in literary theft. At eighteen, he copied a short story word for word from a national magazine and sold it to another magazine, an act of plagiarism for which he was sentenced to a year’s probation. Eight months later, when valuable books began disappearing from the Buffalo Historical Society, Kwiatkowski was arrested for loitering in the building and found to have a list of rare book dealers from several states in his possession. Since transporting stolen property across state lines constitutes a violation of the National Stolen Property Act, the FBI became involved. The agency contacted the dealers on Kwiatkowski’s list and was able to recover the stolen books, for the theft of which Kwiatkowski spent a year and a day in prison.

Upon his release, Kwiatkowski, hardly rehabilitated, began planning the theft of an even more valuable book. His attention may have been caught by the publicity surrounding philanthropist Thomas B. Lockwood’s donation, a few years earlier, of a $35,000 Shakespeare First Folio to the University of Buffalo. Kwiatkowski conceived of a plot in which someone posing as a scholar would gain access to the library’s archive. His brother-in-law, Joseph Biernat, a convicted bootlegger, suggested his friend David Lynch as their accomplice. Lynch was a thirty-six-year-old shoe store clerk from Hudson Falls,
New York, who was making $20 a week at the end of the Great Depression. At their first meeting, in a smoke-filled bar in Albany, Kwiatkowski spoke with rising excitement to Lynch about the huge amounts of money to be made by stealing rare books. “Really, the job is worth twenty thousand to you. Who would be fool enough to turn that down?” he asked. “Not me,” Lynch replied. “I’ll settle for five.”
³

The gang, which included Kwiatkowski’s younger brother Eddie, began a six-week training period in which Lynch rehearsed his role as a professor and made trial visits to research libraries. Charles David Abbott, the librarian of the Lockwood Memorial Library at the University of Buffalo, later recalled that in December 1939, “a stranger who walked with a willowy gait presented himself in the rare-book section of the library and asked to see the First Folio.”
⁴
Abbott showed it to him. The man then returned two days later with a companion (none other than Kwiatkowski himself) and asked to see the folio again. “But you’ve just seen it,” said Abbott, and then proceeded to show Lynch and Kwiatkowski other treasures from the collection. However, the men had no patience for Abbott’s lecture about fine book bindings and soon left.

The purpose of these library visits was not only to give Lynch the opportunity to practice his role as a professor but also to obtain accurate measurements
of the Shakespeare Folio. Once they had done so, Kwiatkowski procured a book of comparable size—a cheaply available folio edition of Goethe’s
Reynard the Fox
(1872)—and cut it down somewhat so that it roughly matched the dimensions of the First Folio they had seen.

Realizing that an attempt to breach the security of a major university might prove risky, Kwiatkowski set his sights on the First Folio held by Williams College in Massachusetts. This small liberal arts school, nestled in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, owned a copy of one of the world’s most valuable books thanks to Alfred Clark Chapin, Class of 1869, who had vowed as an undergraduate “to do something to combat the barrenness and barbaric tendencies of a country college.”
⁵
Chapin went on to a successful career in business and politics—he was the last mayor of Brooklyn before it was absorbed by New York City—and, upon his retirement, began purchasing rare books that he would later donate to the college. In November 1919, he bought a set of all four of the Shakespeare folios (F1, F2, F3, and F4) for $31,000 from James F. Drake, a New York bookseller. The four folios became the cornerstone of the Chapin Library at Williams.

On the morning of February 8, 1940, Kwiatkowski and Biernat dressed Lynch in their fanciful idea of a scholar’s outfit: an ill-fitting suit and a pair of old-fashioned
eyeglasses with a long black ribbon hanging from the right side. They also powdered his hair white and gave him a brown fuzzy hat with a long nap. To enable Lynch to gain entrance to the Chapin Library, Kwiatkowski forged a letter on Middlebury College stationery that read:

With the cut-down copy of
Reynard the Fox
in a black briefcase and a heavy wrinkled overcoat over his arm, Lynch arrived at the Chapin Library at 10:00 a.m. Without speaking, he presented the forged letter of introduction to Lucy Eugenia Osborne, who was the first custodian of the Chapin Library (the official title for the head librarian or director). Her name is on a slate that can be seen at the library today, next to the motto
They sought the best, nothing vulgar
.

“Very well, Professor,” Osborne said. “The library clerk will show you whatever you wish. And you may leave your hat, coat, and bag here.”
⁷

Keeping his briefcase and overcoat with him, Lynch proceeded to a study room inside the library, where the clerk, Geraldine Droppers, brought out the four Shakespeare folios. They had been uniformly bound in morocco—goatskin dyed red with sumac—by the famous London bookbinder Francis Bedford, and each bore his gold stamp on the upper cover. Each folio was enclosed in a chamois-lined box. The books were removed from their boxes and placed on a table in front of Lynch. The cases were put on a nearby window seat, and then Lynch was left alone in the study room.

Lynch put the First Folio in his briefcase, placed the substitute book in the First Folio’s box, and quickly returned to the front room. According to Osborne, the professor “said he wanted to get his wife, who always worked with him and took a great interest in his work.” Osborne did not consider this request to be out of the ordinary. “This is very usual. Many men from out of town bring their wives, who may at first stay out in a car or down at the Inn. Then the man sees how fine the books are and wants his wife to come in, too.” Since Osborne “didn’t want the folios lying there unprotected,” she replaced the three folios in their boxes—noticing that the First Folio was apparently already in its box—and locked the study room to keep it reserved for “Professor Gillingham.”
⁸

Bill and Eddie Kwiatkowski were waiting in a car outside. They picked up Lynch and drove to downtown Williamsburg, where Bill got out with the briefcase and boarded a bus for Buffalo. Eddie then drove Lynch to Pittsfield, where Lynch caught a bus for Hudson Falls, and Eddie went on to Buffalo alone. (The absurdity of making a getaway by public bus did not deter the thieves.)

Back in the Chapin Library, the theft went unnoticed until closing time.

At 4:35 p.m., Droppers went to collect the folios from the study room and screamed, “The First Folio! It’s gone and this book—this cheap book—has been left in its place!”
⁹
The town’s sole police officer, George Royal, was called. Droppers recounted:

The folios were on the table, what looked like all four of them in their cases. But when I picked up what I thought to be the First Folio, I noticed something. You see, I have handled these books so many times. They are unusually heavy. The one I picked up, however, was strangely light. I removed it from its case and opened it. Here it is—you see it is a cheap English translation of Goethe’s
Reynard the Fox
. Worth perhaps one dollar.
¹⁰