Raymond Scott sentenced to eight years in prison as judge condemns damage to book as 'cultural vandalisation'
An unemployed antiques dealer was jailed today for eight years for handling a stolen copy of a rare first collection of Shakespeare's plays.
Raymond Scott took the 17th-century First Folio to one of the world's leading Shakespeare research centres, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, where staff called the police, the British embassy and the FBI.
Regarded as one of the most important printed works in the English language, fewer than 250 copies of the collection survive. They were first printed in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death.
Last month, a jury at Newcastle crown court found Scott guilty of handling stolen goods and removing stolen property from Britain. He was cleared of stealing the book from Durham University in 1998 after claiming to have discovered the book in Cuba.
The judge, Richard Lowden, said the book had been kept out of the public eye for many years and had been 'defaced to hide its true identity'. He branded the damage 'cultural vandalisation' and described the First Folio as a 'quintessentially English treasure'. Scott had either deliberately damaged the book himself or had been party to its damage and was attempting to benefit from it.
'It would be regarded by many as priceless, but to you it was definitely at a very big price and you went to very great lengths for that price,' Lowden said. 'Your motivation was for financial gain.'
Scott, 53, of Wingate, County Durham, was given a six-year prison term for handling stolen goods and two years' imprisonment – to run consecutively – for removing stolen property from Britain. He also admitted the thefts of two paintings worth around £1,000 from Fenwick department store in Newcastle in October 2008. He received two six-month prison sentences to run concurrently.
The 387-year-old book was shown to the court during the trial – the first time it has been displayed in public for a decade. It was taken into court in a padlocked black plastic strongbox and presented on a pillow next to the witness box. Independent experts said the book, even in its damaged state, was worth about £1m.
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