17th century stolen work of Shakespeare surfaces after a decade

The police on Saturday said 51-year-old Raymond Scott had showed it to staff at a library in Washington DC and asked them to verify it was genuine.

After a thorough check up, the Library authorities found it was the stolen folio. Scott was arrested on Friday at his home in Sunderland where he lives with his 80-year-old mother Hannah. He was questioned by police and later released.

The collection, printed in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, is stated to be “the most important printed book in the English language” and is priced at about £15 million on Saturday.

The Folio was among a number of texts taken from the Durham University Library in December 1998.

Only 1,000 of the highly decorated First Folios were printed and it is believed that only 228 still exist— more than a third of them in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, where it was handed in.

Other items taken in the raid were an early handwritten manuscript bearing an English translation of the New Testament dating from the late 14th or early 15th century and a handwritten manuscript of the same period containing a fragment of a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer.