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Both collectors had seen Good Queen Bess's corset advertised in an antique dealer's catalogue. That day they met in the street. "I got ahead of you this time, Henry," crowed the first. "I just ordered Queen Elizabeth's corset by special delivery." Replied Henry: "I cabled."

Millionaire Henry Clay Folger spent a lifetime cabling--for books, manuscripts and rarities to add to his collection. As a student at Amherst College, he had heard Ralph Waldo Emerson, then 76, deliver a lecture on Shakespeare. Young Henry was enchanted. A few years later, he bought a Shakespeare Folio for $107.50. It took him 30 days to pay for it; but it was the beginning of the world's greatest Shakespeare library.

Cold Storage. Over the years, his collection became an obsession. He spent his days directing the affairs of the Standard Oil Co. of New York, his nights poring over catalogues. He kept the size of his collection a secret. When his orders arrived, he uncrated them himself, catalogued them, then repacked them to store in his cellar. As Shakespeare Folios became rarer & rarer, other collectors found him out. Soon he was caught up in the snatch-and-grab world of book-collecting, whose spiteful participants sometimes bid an item high more to keep it from a rival than to have it for themselves. Once, during a Standard Oil directors' meeting, a note from Bibliopole A.S.W. Rosenbach was handed to him. The note read: "I just bought the Marsden Perry collection." Board Chairman Folger was so distressed that he burst into tears.

Among rival collectors, and by the British, who hated to lose their treasures, Henry Folger was regarded as avaricious. But Folger was not collecting just for himself. His dream was to build and endow a great library in the nation's capital. He had set aside over $10 million for it. On a drizzly day in 1930, he and President Hoover attended the laying of the library's cornerstone. Two weeks later, Henry Folger died.

"Merry Meeting." Since his death, the massive Folger Shakespeare Library, in the shadow of the Supreme Court Building, has continued to grow. It now contains 79 Shakespeare Folios (no other library has more than five). Its prizes: the First Quarto of Titus Andronicus, the first work published in Shakespeare's name, and very possibly not his; the Rev. John Ward's diaries, containing the earliest account of the poet's death ("Shakespear, Drayton, and Ben Jhonson had a merry meeting, and, itt seems, drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted").

In its 15 years, Folger has attracted more sightseers than scholars: its treasures have been locked up behind glass cases. Now Amherst College, which runs the library under Folger's will, is out to change all that. Last week Amherst appointed a new director for Folger. Though not a Shakespearean specialist, Dr. Louis B. Wright is a crack librarian (a director of the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif.). He intends to spend most of his time picking students for Folger Fellowships and drumming up scholarly patronage. It shouldn't be hard. Besides its Shakespeare, Folger also houses the world's second largest collection of early English (1475 to 1640) books.* Scholars will find rich pickings, down to the original diagram of Sir John Harington's invention--an early version of the flush toilet.

* The largest is in the British Museum,

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