Art News

Unemployed Book Dealer Gets Jail for Stolen Shakespeare Tome

LONDON (AP).- An unemployed book dealer who paraded as a wealthy playboy was sentenced Monday to eight years in prison for possessing a stolen first edition of Shakespeare’s plays, a rare volume described as a “quintessentially English treasure.” Last month, a jury cleared Raymond Scott, 53, of stealing the First Folio but found him guilty of handling stolen goods and removing stolen property from Britain. Scott was arrested after he took the 1623 volume to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. two years ago and asked to have it authenticated. Experts there alerted police, who say the folio was stolen from a display case at Durham University in northern England in 1998. Scott claimed he had found the volume in Cuba and denied all charges. In passing sentence, Judge Richard Lowden said Scott had tried to use the book to “fund an extremely ludicrous playboy lifestyle” and to impress a woman he had met in Cuba. The judge said Scott was “to some extent a fantasist” but