OAKLAND — Mills College will sell a nearly 400-year-old folio of William Shakespeare’s plays that is among the world’s most coveted rare books, in a move that could raise millions of dollars for the private Oakland college as it recovers from a financial emergency.
College President Elizabeth Hillman announced the sale of the folio and an unspecified “musical manuscript” in an email to students last week.
“In order to continue to support Mills’ current programs and people while we build a bridge to a sustainable future, the college has decided to sell two precious assets,” Hillman wrote in the email Thursday. “These gifts have been treasured deeply by the Mills community and will now be sold in compliance with college regulations.”
Mills officials on Wednesday refused to provide more information about the sale.
KQED, which first reported the college’s plans, said the manuscript is a handwritten musical score from composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that dates to the 1770s.
Mills’ copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, a collection of 36 plays first published in 1623, has been held at the college’s F.W. Olin Library.
Thomas Goldwasser, a San Francisco rare book seller specializing in English and American literature, said that while the First Folio is not incredibly rare — UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and the State of California’s Sutro Library, among others, have copies — it is hard to overstate the work’s significance.
“It is the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays (and) includes many that have not been published separately before,” Goldwasser said. “One would have to consider it the single most important work in English literature.”
Goldwasser said he expects that whoever buys the folio will pay “in the $2 million range” for it, depending on quality.
Stuart Bennett, another rare book seller who appraised Mills’ copy of the folio in 2007, said he would be “very surprised” if it did not fetch at least $4 million. It could go for as much as $6 million, he said.
There are 233 recorded copies of the First Folio still around, of 750 that were originally printed. Mills’ copy was donated by Mary Louise O’Brien, a Mills alumna and former trustee who was the daughter of an English professor.
Copies of the folio have hit the market only a few times over the past decade, Goldwasser said.
A buyer at a 2016 auction in London paid $2.75 million for one. But Bennett noted that copy had several important pages missing, and was subject to major restorations.
Mills’ copy, meanwhile, “is substantially complete,” Bennett said. It still has all of its pages and sustained relatively minor damage over the years, he said.
Bennett declined to say precisely how much he told Mills its copy was worth, saying he considered the appraisal confidential. Suffice to say, Bennett said, “This is an attractive copy.”
The sale is a part of the MillsNext Strategic Plan, an initiative the college launched in 2017 after declining enrollment and a multi-million-dollar deficit led it to declare a financial emergency and lay off faculty and staff.
“We have much to look forward to as a college and a community, and we will keep the campus and community apprised as the many initiatives underway move forward,” Hillman wrote.
While the sale will certainly raise money for Mills, Goldwasser said the buyer of the folio will likely be a private collector, rather than another library or similar institution, which could be a loss for the broader community.
“You can’t discount what the influence might have been on some future Mills student coming across it,” Goldwasser said.