Shakespeare edition sells for €4m

A HISTORIC First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays was yesterday snapped up by a book dealer for €4 million (£2.8m) at auction.

Meanwhile, a first edition of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses sold for £30,000 (43,553).

Sotheby’s regularly auction first editions of Ulysses, widely regarded as the greatest English novel of the 20th century, and last December sold one for £66,000 (€95,000).

Another first edition signed by Joyce set a world record when it sold for 460,000 in Christie’s in New York in 2002.

Ulysses follows the travels of Leopold Bloom around Dublin on one day, June 16, 1904, and enraged censors with many countries initially banning it.

In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses at Number 1 on a list of the 100 best novels in English of the last century. The sale at Sotheby’s auction rooms in New Bond Street also included lots of English literature, history, fine bindings, private press and children’s books, including the First Folio of Shakespeare.

Probably costing 20 shillings and published in 1623, just seven years after the Bard’s death, the First Folio contains 36 plays, 18 of which had never previously been printed.

Other lots included a first collected edition of Shakespeare’s Poems, which sold for £68,400.

A Sotheby’s spokesman said the price was the highest for a First Folio of Shakespeare at auction in Britain, and the most valuable printed book ever sold at Sotheby’s London.

He added that the successful final bid was made by Simon Finch Rare Books, which is based in Mayfair, central London.

Experts believe those 18 plays — including Macbeth, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar — may have been “lost to posterity” were it not for their appearance in the First Folio.

About 750 copies of the First Folio were printed, with about a third of them surviving to the present day, most of them incomplete.

But the copy on sale was described as one of the “two finest” to appear at auction in London since the Second World War.

The Folio was being sold alongside other historic lots at Sotheby’s sale of English Literature and History in New Bond Street. Sotheby’s said the copy sold yesterday was enhanced by “extensive” markings and annotations, including a number made by a single reader, probably in the 1600s.

The book, which also still retains its 17th Century binding of plain brown calf, was put up for auction by one of the oldest libraries open to the public.

Dr Williams’s Library in London was set up in the early 18th Century under the will of a Presbyterian minister.