Background
Henry Folger was born on June 18, 1857, in New York City, New York. He was the eldest of the eight children of Henry Clay and Eliza Jane Folger.
1879
Henry Folger
1925
Henry Folger
1927
Portrait of Henry by Frank Owen Salisbury
Henry Folger
Henry Folger
Henry Folger
Henry Folger was born on June 18, 1857, in New York City, New York. He was the eldest of the eight children of Henry Clay and Eliza Jane Folger.
Henry Folger attended Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn before enrolling at Amherst College. During his junior year, his father's business failed, and Henry had to study the College of the City of New York. His childhood friend and Amherst classmate Charles Pratt guaranteed the funding needed for him to continue his studies at Amherst. So, he got a Bachelor of Arts in 1879 and was elected Phi Beta Kappa in 1879. Also, Henry graduated from Columbia University. He got there a Bachelor of Laws in 1881.
During his senior year at Amherst College, Henry Folger heard a lecture that would change his life. It was one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's final public lectures, Superlative or Mental Temperance. It inspired Henry to read Emerson's essays on Shakespeare, including The Tercentenary of Shakespeare's Birth. Soon he became interested in the works of Shakespeare. As soon as he could, Henry Folger began collecting books by and about the poet and dramatist. The result was the Henry Clay Folger Shakespeare Library, the biggest Shakespeare library in the world.
In 1885, four years after he graduated from Columbia, he married another Shakespeare enthusiast, Vassar College graduate Emily Jordan. She became a vital partner in Henry's collection of Shakespearean works, and helped purchase books and cataloged the collection.
After graduating, Henry started to work at the oil company, Pratt & Company. He advanced from clerk to secretary and eventually chairman of the manufacturing committee. As chairman, he worked with the management of one of the company's big plants, the Standard Oil Company. In 1908 Henry was elected a director of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the next year a director of Standard Oil of New York. When the Standard Oil trust dissolved in 1911, he helped reorganize it and became the president of the Standard Oil Company of New York (or Socony).
During his years with Standard Oil, its original capital of $5,000,000 grew to $450,000,000 by 1927. By 1928 its net income was $39,645,228, and it owned the entire outstanding stock of several other companies, including the Tank Storage and Carriage Limited Company of Great Britain, the Standard Transportation Company, the Lotus Oil, and Distributing Corporation and the Magnolia Company of Texas. Five years after becoming chairman of the board of directors of Socony, Folger left his job to dedicate himself to his Shakespearean library.
Henry Folger had begun purchasing Shakespearean works shortly after he graduated, starting with the Handy Volume Edition of Shakespeare, published by Routledge. All his life, and during his travels, Henry always kept at least one of the thirteen volumes by him. He competed directly with Henry Huntington and another collector, known as the "dean" of Shakespeare collectors, William White. White and Huntington, however, collected in other areas while Henry only collected Shakespearean-related materials. Dealers knew this and often made their first offers to Henry. His first major purchase was a Halliwell-Phillipps edition of Shakespeare's first folio in reduced facsimile. At that time, Henry Folger had no intention of starting a collection; he simply wanted to learn more about Shakespeare. But as he studied the edition and discovered the remarkable differences between the first folio text in his facsimile and the contemporary issuance, he felt compelled to study over original publications. By the time Henry Folger completed his collection, he had every known issue, but one, of each of the four Shakespeare folios.
Henry Folger's collection also included some of the first and rarest of the quartos, including a rare copy of Titus Andronicus, and the Gwynn volume, the only known copy of a collected edition of nine plays, which Thomas Pavier and William Jaggard brought out in 1619. Another significant purchase was the Vincent copy of the first folio, brought out in 1623 and still with the original bindings and uncut leaves.
Folger with hi wife took several trips to England to add to the collection, combing auction houses and book catalogs. When he could not travel, Folger had agents search and bid for him. Collecting became the childless couple's obsession, and their life was pointed into better fund their collection. By 1909 his vision for his library had expanded. He wrote that he had "found the means of adding the collection of Shakespeareana until it will be the largest in the United States. Perhaps, it will be the largest in the world. That says a lot, for collecting Shakespearean has been the life-work of many students during the past hundred years."
Once the Folgers realized they had the finest Shakespearean collection in the United States, they started plans to construct a building for it in Washington. Henry wanted to create a building whose exterior would match the classic architecture of the nearby Library of Congress and the United States Supreme Court buildings, and whose interior would reference Elizabethan England.
The library had room for 150,000 volumes, a study room, a reading room, an exhibition gallery, reception, and administration rooms and an auditorium based on a Shakespearean theater. Though Folger died before the building completed, he lived to see the cornerstone laid on May 28, 1930, less than two weeks before his death. The library has left in the trust of Amherst College trustees with an endowment for maintenance and expansion.
The Henry Clay Folger Shakespeare Library opened in 1931. It had 80,000 volumes, including those owned by other well-known authors, scholarly works on Shakespeare, prompt books, and manuscripts. There were 1,400 different copies of Shakespeare's collected works, with seventy-nine copies of the first folio, fifty of the second folio, and twenty-four of the third folio. Among Shakespeare's poetic works are two copies of the sonnets from their first printing in 1609, and ten copies of the first collected edition, published in 1640. Folger had written several monographs on Shakespearean subjects. These have a place in the library, as do Tudor and Stuart's histories. As Adams noted, the library also holds artworks, furniture, and other related artifacts.
Henry Folger was a trustee of the Hamilton Trust Company, a director of Seaboard National Bank in New York, and a trustee of the Central Congregational Church in Brooklyn. He also founded the Shakespeare Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Besides, Henry Folger was a writer. His works included A Tribute to the Memory of Charles Pratt and A Unique First Folio.
Henry Folger enjoyed his collection for its own sake, enjoyed the triumphs and hazards of the quest, and, most of all, enjoyed in anticipation the possible application that he planned to make of his treasures. Since publicity would have been ruinous to his project, he acquired his books as silently as possible and held them rather privately. In the world of Shakespearian scholars, the Folger collection was as an invisible planet whose magnitude could be conjectured only by the irresistible force with which it attracted lesser bodies to it. Pending the completion of his plans, Henry was compelled to store his books in several vaults in New York and Brooklyn and never saw his library assembled.
Alpha Delta Phi , United States
Phi Beta Kappa , United States
Henry Folger possessed the masterful qualities, of a great executive, that were ennobled by broad humanity. In a manner, he was unassuming, gentle at times, whimsically humorous.
Golf.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
William Shakespeare.
Henry Folger married Emily Clara Jordan on October 6, 1885. The had no children.