ABSTRACT
A good many years ago, during one of the interesting winter conferences of the American Library Association at the fine old Drake Hotel in Chicago, I attended a formal dinner where my companion and I found ourselves at a table with Edwin W. Willoughby, the famous bibliographer of the Folger Library in Washington. Willoughby was a congenial dinner companion and my companion and I spent the rest of the evening in conversation with him. Willoughby was a short, rather heavy set man, his ruddy face surmounted by a mane of steel gray hair and his eyebrows dark and lowering above bright blue eyes. He told us countless stories of his adventures in seeking out and acquiring for the Folger Library some of the treasures that make up its priceless holdings. One such story had to do with his rescuing of a somewhat battered copy of a Shakespeare first folio that he found being used in a London tavern as a dartboard. He paid for it on the spot, out of his own pocket, and carried it away with him into a rainy night, hugging it to himself under his overcoat. He told of other discoveries of Shakespeare-related materials as he mined the rich warehouses of London’s booksellers down on the waterfront of the Thames. He was strangely prophetic, that evening in the late 1930s, saying that the vast riches of the city’s used book trade were in perilous danger if there should truly be a war, and London should suffer the kind of air raids Germany was carrying out to the east of its own borders. I saw Willoughby a few years after the fire raids of the Battle of Britain, and he reminded me of our earlier conversation, and informed me of the total destruction of three of his favorite book lofts on the river. He mentioned also the death of Thomas Heffer, who had been a lifelong friend, killed as he struggled with a single hose to keep the roof of his warehouse from burning.
