How to Make Hot Stuff Cool for Collectors

Raymond Scott, 51, is described in the British press as an "eccentric playboy", though one might think of other ways of describing this show-off alcoholic unemployed man who lives beyond his means with his Mum in Sandford Close, Wingate, County Durham. He was convicted yesterday of handling stolen property. The items included a 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare's plays which had been stolen from Durham University library a decade earlier just twelve miles from his home, though Scott has not been convicted of this theft, but he is apparently associated with serious damage recently done to one of the finest of the 230 known surviving copies of the first printed collection of the plays.

He turned up in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC with this book, asking to have it evaluated. He claimed it was the property of an acquaintance in Cuba in whose family the volume had been a long time. The library staff immediately recognised that, although the volume brought in had been mutilated (somebody had removed the cover and characteristic colophon), there were records of this precise copy in the Durham collection, and Mr Scott was arrested in England (for interesting comments on this see Paul Collins, 'Folioed Again! Why Shakespeare is the world's worst stolen treasure', Slate Thursday, July 17, 2008).

The court cases have been dragging on for a while now, noted in the media for Mr Scott's increasingly bizarre attempts to attract attention to himself (here he is arriving at court in Consett in February 2009), but have finally resulted in a conviction for the handling of stolen property charge (Martin Wainwright, 'Raymond Scott guilty of handling stolen folio of Shakespeare's plays', Guardian, Friday 9 July 2010).

1) First folios are a finite resource, so in order to profit from the "surfacing" (from underground) of a "new" one, one had to be taken from in its original context, in this case a poorly secured case in a university library exhibition.

2) The object then had to be decontextualised, removing any associations with the context from which it had been taken. In this case the object was mutilated to remove traces left by previous owners.

3) Then, to face off the possibility that somebody might ask questions about where it had "surfaced", a false but still rather vague anecdotal "old collection" provenance was concocted. A Cuban "old collection", but of course there could be no documentation of this by which means this could be verified.

4) Mr Scott reportedly had a number of other old books in his house and tried to present himself as a legitimate antiquarian book dealer. The other old books he had were low value items, probably legitimately obtained from the breakup of old libraries. Scott's bizarre behaviour in court was intended to bolster the impression that he could be the sort of jet-setting dealer that could have come into possession of such an item.

5) The object would not be as saleable in the UK as the connection might be made by law enforcement authorities between the "new" item and the seller's address near where the lost one had gone missing. So to reduce that possibility, the object was smuggled out of the UK to an "anything goes" foreign market.

6) Any buyer would need convincing this was authentic and not some reprint or fake, so the book was shown to the Folger, once it had been authenticated by them as "not stolen" (which Scott seemed confident would be the case), he would have been able to sell it. Fortunately the staff at the Folger are not like the no-questions-asked private collectors who gullibly believe items suface on the market from the caves of the Antiquity Elves under Collectormyth Mountain. They asked themselves where this item had really "surfaced" from, and it was only after a bit of investigation of the false provenance, that the truth which the seller was trying to obscure emerged.


Mr Scott and his accomplices were acting in exactly the same way as the dealers of ancient artefacts on the no-questions-asked market.

1) Portable Antiquities "surface" (from underground) through illegal looting of archaeological sites (Criminal activity).

2) Portable Antiquities from such sources have to be decontextualised, removing any associations with the context from which it had been taken (provenance concealment).

3) Portable Antiquities may be given a false but vague anecdotal "old collection" provenance, never with any documentation offered by means of which this could be verified (provenance laundering- Optional on the no-questions-asked market for antiquities).

4) Dealers who have such items in their stock (obtained from dubious, criminal or unchecked sources) may present themselves as legitimate antiquarian dealers, and sell the 'laundered' looted items indiscriminately among other artefacts more legitimately obtained from the breakup of old collections. The air of dealer "respectability" is crucial here, may be bolstered by lavish showrooms and meaninglessly-worded "codes of ethics" (marketing).

5) Dodgy Portable Antiquities would not be as saleable in the source country as in "anything goes" foreign markets, so a large proportion of looted archaeological items are smuggled out of the country of origin (criminal activity).

6) "Authenticity" of a portable antiquity is enhanced by the dealer's "reputation" a rather nebulous concept considering that in the antiquity collectors' world, that reputation is built up by being able to supply continuing series of items "freshly surfaced" on the market from some vague previously unrecorded "old collections" without anybody feeling the need to question where they are really from. ;

Here the Antiquity Elves under Collectormyth Mountain are kept constantly busy.

The criminal career of Mr Scott has another parallel with that of antiquity dealers. He would like to see "duplicate" items held in the research collections of public institutions "liberated' onto the open market. In a letter to his local paper after being arrested, the 'dealer" wrote that the University of Durham's priceless archives are nothing more than ‘redundant relics’ and should be sold off and the money ploughed back into the local community:

"Sold on the open market, these redundant relics would raise billions which could benefit the university itself and the people of County Durham, which is still a deprived area. I think any fair-minded person will find this morally repugnant. It has been said that it is essential for scholarship that all these books are under one roof, but I and many others dispute the relevance of this when, these days, everything can be recorded electronically. Indeed, the very physical handling of these fragile keepsakes is strongly discouraged. I say, “Free the books”."

Dave Welsh and the ACCG have constantly made the same points about museums holding what they see as "duplicate" collectable antiquities in their research collections.


What in the no-questions-asked buying and selling or archaeological artefacts is really "morally repugnant" to any fair-minded person?