A Shakespeare First Folio has been discovered in a library in a small French town where it lay undiscovered for two centuries, reports The Telegraph.
It is only the second known copy in France of a publication that is seen as one of the most valuable books in the English language and which can sell for millions on the rare occasions a copy comes up for auction.
The librarian in the northern town of Saint-Omer, near Calais, said he came across the book in September when he was selecting books for an upcoming exhibition on historic links between the local region and England.
“It was sitting on a shelf alongside other books by English authors,” Rémy Cordonnier, who runs the library’s rare books collection, told The Telegraph.
It was missing the frontispiece and the portrait of Shakespeare that are the hallmark of the around 800 copies of the First Folio, which set down 18 plays for the first time, that were originally printed in 1623, seven years after the playwright's death.
“That is probably why earlier librarians had identified it as an 18th-century work,” the 35-year-old librarian said.
“I was trembling when I picked it up and realised what it might be,” said Mr Cordonnier, whose library was opened in 1805 but holds books from the nearby Abbey of Saint Bertin, which dates back to the 7th century and was home to what was seen as the fourth most important library of Western Christendom.
Professor Rasmussen wrote a book on the First Folio called “The Shakespeare Thefts” detailing his thrilling global hunt for what remains of the initial copies of the book, a favourite for thieves across the centuries.
He describes “run-ins with heavily tattooed criminal street gangs in Tokyo, bizarre visits with eccentric, reclusive billionaires, and intense battles of wills with secretive librarians,” according to the publisher.
The name Nevill was written on the copy of the book in Saint-Omar and the librarian believes he may have been one of the many English students who attended a Jesuit college in Saint-Omer, which centuries ago was one of the most important towns in northern France.
There are only around 230 copies of the First Folio - titled “Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies” - known to exist in collections or in private hands around the world.
Without the First Folio edition, much of Shakespeare’s work - including works such as Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night or Macbeth - might have been lost to the world as 18 of his plays remained unpublished at his death in 1616.
“I needed to find out if this was a real discovery or if the book had been listed somewhere [in the library’s catalogue] without us knowing about it,” he said.
He got in touch with Professor Eric Rasmussen from the University of Nevada, an internationally known Shakespeare scholar, who by chance happened to be on a visit to London.
The professor jumped on a Eurostar train last Saturday and made his way to Saint-Omer, where, according to the town’s mayor, François Decoster, he took no more than five minutes to conclude that it was an authentic copy.