Henry Clay Folger Jr. (June 18, 1857 – June 11, 1930) was an American businessman who was president and later chairman of Standard Oil of New York, a collector of Shakespeareana, and co-founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library alongside his wife Emily Jordan Folger.
Early life
Henry Clay Folger Jr. was born in New York City to Henry Clay Folger Sr. of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Eliza Jane (Clark) Folger of New York, the eldest of their eight children. He was a first cousin six times removed of Benjamin Franklin and a nephew of J. A. Folger, the founder of Folger Coffee. He descended from Peter Foulger (the maternal grandfather of Benjamin Franklin) and Mary Foulger (née Morrill).
He graduated from Adelphi Academy, in Brooklyn, New York, where Charles Pratt, the businessman and president of Adelphi's board of trustees, became a mentor to him. At Adelphi, Folger was schooled in art, chemistry, classics, and recitation, and was elected president of the school's literary association. He then attended Amherst College with Charles Millard Pratt, a close friend and son of Folger's mentor at Adelphi. To fund his education, Folger competed in many oratorical essay contests, winning prizes in 1876 and again in 1879, which paid for his junior year of school. Folger modeled his rhetorical style on Daniel Webster's. He identified a Shakespeare-related essay contest as the origin of his obsession with the Bard. His wife, Emily, however, would later attribute Folger's initial fascination with Shakespeare to an 1879 lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose eloquent delivery sounded Shakespearean to the college student. At Amherst, Folger was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1879. Following graduation, he attended Columbia Law School from 1879 to 1881, gaining admittance to the bar in 1881.
thumb|left|Folger in 1879, the year he graduated from Amherst College
Career
Beginning in 1881, he worked for the Standard Oil trust of John D. Rockefeller, getting his start in the oil business as a clerk at Charles Pratt & Company, a refinery owned by Charles Pratt, the father of his Adelphi and Amherst classmate Charles Millard Pratt. The Pratt Company was already associated with Standard Oil at that time. Folger quickly showed his prowess as a mathematician and statistician; his management of data on oil processing led to a promotion in 1886, when he became the secretary of Standard Oil's manufacturing committee. In 1890, Folger wrote Petroleum: Its Production and Products in Pennsylvania, an article for Chambers's Encyclopaedia about the oil business.
Folger's assets increased in 1899, when he was promoted to chairman of the manufacturing committee, the same year that Standard Oil of New Jersey became the central holding company for the Standard Oil Trust, which dissolved after the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The stock Folger held in Standard Oil of New Jersey would contribute significantly to Folger's ability to collect Shakespeareana. In 1908, he was elected assistant treasurer of Jersey Standard, and joined its board of sixteen directors, managing the company's finances and compiling production data. That year, Folger was also elected to Jersey Standard's executive committee.
The 1911 Supreme Court decision to break up the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey monopoly resulted in the election of Folger as president of the second-largest company formed from the dissolved Jersey Standard, the Standard Oil Company of New York, or Socony. Folger also owned significant amounts of stock in the Magnolia Petroleum Company, a Texan company that became a fully owned subsidiary of Socony in 1925. He retired as president in 1923, but stayed at Socony as the first chairman of its board of trustees until 1928, when he officially retired to devote all of his attention to plans for his Shakespeare Library. Folger was succeeded as president by Herbert L. Pratt, another son of Charles Pratt.
In 1956, the Folger Shakespeare Library received Folger's walnut desk from Socony Mobil Oil. Since that year, it has been used by the Library's director. The first rare book Folger acquired was a 1685 copy of the Fourth Folio, purchased in 1889 for $107.50. He purchased his first original copy of the First Folio four years later, in 1893. Unlike other wealthy collectors of the period, like Henry E. Huntington and J.P. Morgan, Folger favored "imperfect" copies of rare volumes, with their marginalia and other markings. Following this trend, his Folio collection was marked with diversity in provenance and condition. He preferred to purchase Early Editions of books published between 1567 and 1606, in addition to manuscripts of the period. Based on their collective knowledge of Latin and French, and Emily's proficiency in German, the couple also favored rare volumes published on the Continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The couple was less interested in art collection, and many of the Shakespeare-related paintings they purchased were misattributed to artists like Thomas Gainsborough.
The Folgers chose items to purchase from booksellers' catalogues, which were initially perused and marked up by Emily, before she passed them on to Henry, who kept an extensive and precise list of items he intended to bid on. If possible, he inspected an item personally before purchasing it. He also avoided consulting scholarly experts about rare volumes, preferring his own and Emily's expertise, as she received an M.A. from Vassar College in 1896 for a thesis on Shakespeare. Folger used professional booksellers as middlemen at auctions, believing that the concealment of his identity would keep prices low. Due to the growing size of the collection and their concern for fireproofing, eventually few of the Folgers' acquisitions were stored in their living space. They kept an extensive card catalog at home in Brooklyn, and when traveling, took a smaller, annotated set of check lists along with them. The collection itself was stored among several fireproof warehouse companies throughout Manhattan, in specially designed wooden cases originally meant to hold two five-gallon cans of oil each. Frederick Fales, a co-worker of Folger's at Standard Oil, initially designed and ordered these air-tight wooden cases for company use. Some of the most valuable items were kept in bank vaults, or in a safe in Folger's office.
Folger financed a half-century of collecting with his Standard Oil salary and extensive investments in the company. His high placement at Standard Oil also allowed him to take out loans with his friend Charles Millard Pratt, John D. Rockefeller, and even his wife, to fund his purchases. He generally paid for items in cash, a strategy that earned him the favor of many booksellers who needed immediate funds. Folger also preferred to purchase whole collections, like the Halliwell-Phillipps collection, acquired in 1908, because bulk purchases drove down prices of individual items. He was a trustee of the Central Congregational Church in Brooklyn
In a 1933 lecture delivered after his death, Emily identified King Lear as his favorite of Shakespeare's plays. Reverend Samuel Parkes Cadman, who, along with his wife, had been close with the Folgers, gave Henry's eulogy. Henry's ashes were interred beneath the Folgers' reproduction of Shakespeare's funerary monument in what became the Folger Shakespeare Library's Old Reading Room. His wife Emily died in 1936.
Writings
Folger wrote Petroleum: Its Production and Products and articles on Shakespeare and Shakespeareana.