Inside the new high-tech vault that keeps Shakespeare’s rarest books safe

Greg Prickman is cagey about the security details around the massive new glass vault on display at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.



And he has every right to be—because it contains the raw materials of modern storytelling at large: 82 copies of the bard’s First Folio , the bound collection of Shakespeare’s plays, produced seven years after his death. It is, by far, the world’s largest collection of First Folios, some of which are valued at millions of dollars.



[Photo: Lloyd Wolf/courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library]



How thick is the glass of the 20-foot vault?



“It’s good glass,” says Prickman, the library’s director of collections. “I’ll just leave it at that.”



What happens if the building loses power?



No comment. 



Does the vault recede underground or anything after the library closes for the day, National Archives-style (and, well, National Treasure -style )?



No comment.



“It’s funny when you get to the point of watching that movie for work purposes,” Prickman says.



[Photo: © Alan Karchmer/courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library]



SUBTERRANEAN SHAKESPEARE



The Folger Shakespeare Library, which sits on Capitol Hill, has been closed for the past four-and-a-half years for a colossal renovation, and it reopens June 21. Rather than rearrange its original white marble facade, featuring bas-reliefs of characters from Shakespeare’s plays, the library expanded and carved out a 12,000-square-foot space directly underneath it. There are fresh exhibitions, interactive learning labs and more—but the star, hands-down, is the show-stopping new glass vault housing rows and rows of gently lit bound folios. 



[Photo: © Alan Karchmer/courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library]



In his lifetime, oilman Henry Clay Folger amassed more than one-third of all the remaining folios in existence. And here, presented together in public for the very first time, the enormity of that achievement becomes strikingly manifest with little exhibition design trickery needed. The next biggest collection resides at Meisei University in Tokyo, and consists of 12 copies. To see a wall of 82 of them is, frankly, shocking.



[Photo: Lloyd Wolf/courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library]



They are indeed priceless—but if you had to put a price on them, one single volume sold at auction in 2020 for nearly $10 million . Which is perhaps why, until now, only a privileged few could pass through fire doors, hulking safe doors, and descend an elevator down to the nether realm of the Folger to bear witness to them.



“We took those items, which previously were in the furthest corner of the deepest vault here—and they’re now pretty much right inside the front door,” Prickman says. “I do think it is representative of a philosophy behind this renovation and expansion.”



That stated goal, per a release from the Folger: to transform the library into a welcoming and accessible 21st-century space where anyone can engage with its collections. And that includes those who may have no idea what a First Folio is, or why a collection of them holds so much literary (and financial) weight.



[Photo: © Alan Karchmer/courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library]



A high tech vault



An interactive display brings the Folio vault to life. Lights on each shelf highlight specific copies, pointing out which are the earliest acquired copies; which have the oldest bindings; which were the most or least expensive to procure; and so on. Touchscreen displays allow users to take on various roles (e.g., a detective or a collector) and inspect specific editions to discover what makes them unique—production quirks, the marks left within them, or who previously owned them. At the opposite end of the tech spectrum, the library has also brought in a printing press, where visitors can get hands-on setting type and ultimately learn about the imperfect creative process that makes each Folio distinct.



To create the new space, the library’s holdings— thousands and thousands of rare pieces—had to be moved. (Something that was also done during World War II, when the First Folios were discretely loaded onto two trains and transported to a vault in Amherst under armed guard.) This time around, Prickman won’t say where they were held, but he did reveal that the collections were stored across six locations. (“The risk is distributed; it’s mitigated just a little bit by the fact that it’s not concentrated,” he notes.)



When the First Folios returned to their new home, they were placed in a vault that doubles as a public display and benefits from the full wisdom of a near century of institutional preservation knowledge. The case has its own climate system, set to 55 degrees, with a humidity range between 45% and 55%. The library also treats the threat of pests like booklice with utmost care, with multiple levels of staff trained to recognize and report it, among other measures. In the event of a fire, the Folger has highly targeted and precise sprinkler systems (after all, Prickman says, it’s easier to remedy water damage than it is fire damage); in the past, representatives of the Folger have also said the library has a system to remove oxygen from a vault in the event of a fire. 



The lighting, meanwhile, is carefully maintained at under 30 lux (by comparison, an office usually runs at around 500 lux). Prickman concedes that in a perfect world, the manuscripts would be kept in the equivalent of a cave. But that would defeat the whole point of the library and its holdings to begin with.



“[The new vault represents,] in some ways, a tension between preservation and exhibition. And in my role, I don’t see those as mutually exclusive,” says Pickman. “There’s no doubt that the best way to preserve these things is to keep them in the dark, and not disturb them—but . . . if we were to do that, there would be very little point in having them in the first place.”