Missing Shakespeare Knocks on Folger's Door

The reason the First Folio is so cherished is that without it, "we wouldn't have about half of Shakespeare's plays," said Maynard Mack Jr., an English professor and a Shakespeare expert at the University of Maryland.

Eighteen of the Bard's plays appeared nowhere else but the First Folio. Imagine a world without "Antony and Cleopatra" or "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

"It's a huge book with dense, double-column pages," Mack said.

The loss of any single example of the First Folio is not the same as losing a masterpiece painting. Yet in subtle ways, each First Folio is unique, and scholars can trace the production of the volume by those differences.

"That is why recovering the Durham one is so important," Mack said.

And that is also how the alleged thief was caught.

When the mysterious man arrived at the Folger last month, he had a story to go with his book: He said the work was from a family library in Cuba, and he was representing the family.

"From time to time, people have asked us to help them to figure out what a book might be," the Folger's Scott said. "On the other hand, usually those people have called or e-mailed beforehand. It's a little unusual to just show up."

Librarian Richard Kuhta met the man and examined the book. "It's clear to Richard immediately that this is something important," Scott said.

Kuhta asked the man if the library could keep the volume for further study, and the man agreed to leave it for two days. "Alarm bells" were going off in the minds of the library's staff, Scott said. "It's the first time a genuine First Folio has walked into our doors unannounced."

When the man returned, Kuhta was able to tell him that the book was an authentic First Folio. But Kuhta and the Folger staff still wanted to determine which of the 230 extant First Folios it was. A few of the opening pages of the version presented to the Folger had been removed. They would have contained obvious markings tied to the Durham First Folio.

But each First Folio can be identified by other marks and printing idiosyncrasies.