![]() (The last time Christie’s auction house sold a First Folio, in a public auction in October 2020, it sold for $9,978,000.) The university worked for long months to acquire it from a private collector in the U.S., through Christie’s New York, with funding from a consortium of anonymous donors from across North America and support from the Department of Canadian Heritage. When the opportunity to acquire this First Folio arose in January 2021, Katherine Kalsbeek, head of rare books and special collections at UBC Library, says that the library felt it had to act, with so few copies left in private hands. “That’s why we feature Macbeth: nobody would have heard of Macbeth, except people in the 17th century, without it.”įor All Time is meant as an immediate celebration of UBC Library’s hard-won acquisition, in June 2021, of a complete first edition of William Shakespeare's Comedies Histories and Tragedies, published in 1623. “Some of his greatest plays only survive because of this book half of Shakespeare’s plays would have been lost to history,” says exhibition curator Gregory Mackie, associate professor of English and Norman Colbeck Curator, UBC Library Rare Books and Special Collections, in an interview at the gallery. The book contains 36 plays in total-including Macbeth and Julius Caesar, which sits on the facing page at the gallery-many of them passed down through history only because of this publication seven years after Shakespeare’s death. There were many pages the team who acquired the book could have turned to in its display of this beyond-rare new prize in the UBC Library collection. Of the estimated 235 copies that remain worldwide, there is only one other version in Canada-in Toronto. And looking at it in person, as Stir did this morning, is thrilling-no matter how much you know about the Bard. Measuring about 8.5-by-13 inches, the precious book is at the centre of the just-announced For All Time: The Shakespeare FIRST FOLIO exhibit, presented by the VAG with the UBC Library. On close inspection, the edges of the pages still hold much of their gilded sheen, enclosed in red morocco leather decorated with gold. ![]() Ornate scrollwork adorns the page atop the title in original Elizabethan script: The Tragedie of Macbeth. SET BENEATH A glass case on the fourth floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Shakespeare’s 399-year-old First Folio now sits open to the first scene of Macbeth. ![]()
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