The return of Durham's First Folio has always been told as a tale of celebration. It is a lost and found story. A man walked into Durham Cosin’s Library, took it off display and walked out with it in broad daylight in 1998. Ten years later, the book turned up in Folger Shakespeare Library in the US. It was badly damaged, with its cover and some pages missing. It was returned to Durham in 2010 to the great joy of many. Much research and conservation works have been done since and I was excited to see it on display in Cosin’s Library several times last year.
I never heard anything about the man who took the punishment for this crime until I read Emma Smith’s Portable Magic:
Raymond Scott… walked, wearing flip-flops, as the librarians later recalled in bemusement, into the Folger, the world's foremost Shakespeare library, in Washington DC, with a copy of the first edition of Shakespeare's plays. The First Folio is one of the world's most-coveted books… Of course, Scott was promptly arrested: First Folios don't just appear out of nowhere. Perhaps out of naivety, he had taken it to the most expert place on the planet for an opinion, and their opinion was it must have been stolen. It did indeed belong to Durham Cathedral Libraty, from where it had been stolen while on display a decade earlier. Scott arrived at Newcastle Crown Court in a stretch limo, smoking a cigar and eating Pot Noodles, and quoting from Richard III, 'a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse'. Although there was no suspicion of violence in the case, he was sentenced to eight years in prison. As for Orton and Halliwell, the sentence seemed grossly disproportionate. In the same month as Scott's conviction, two teenagers were sentenced to five years for inflicting fatal injuries on a grandfather on his way home from the mosque, and a man whose company knowingly sold lethally unfit body armour to British troops in the Trag War received a two-year suspended prison sentence. Something is happening when harm to books comes up for judgement.
In Scott's case, something about the intrinsic cultural value of the specific book, combined with its elevated price tag (First Folios sell at auction for millions of dollars), had inflated the seriousness of this non-violent crime. Or maybe it is more that injuries done to the book during its absence from Durham, including the removal of preliminary leaves to conceal its provenance, are punished as if they were equal to, or more heinous than, equivalent acts of violence on a person… The consequence of the sentence was horrible. Scott took his own life in prison some eighteen months later, overwhelmed by the prospect of his jail term. The publicity for this desperately sad case was, throughout, much more concerned with the fate of the iconic book than with the unstable man, and the book's preservation was implicitly prioritized over that of Scott himself.
I was shocked and saddened by this. I'm not sure why the sentence is so long and heavy. Presumably because of the value of the item? I can no longer tell the story of Durham's First Folio with unalloyed joy because the return of the lost book lead to the end of a man's life. Emma Smith highlights the tragic irony where the preservation of a material object—no matter how historically unique—is implicitly valued over a human life. Looking back on those visits to the exhibition, I remember being blissfully absorbed in the video fussing over the book's damaged binding, entirely oblivious to the human life fading in the dark. My regret and sadness can do nothing for the life lost. But I can't help wondering, has the price of preserving our past become too high?