Weirdly rooting for Logan Paul on this one...

Well sure, the commission tied directly to
the sale price, but why else would they lie?

I'm not entirely sure what's the point of estimating what something will sell for at an auction. Like, isn't part of appeal of auctions the uncertainty? Auction people live for the drama. If you know what it's going to go for before hand, it's just a thing that's for sale. Anyway, there's a First Folio going up for auction at Sotheby's next month and their in-house auction predictors--which I assume is a job--have predicted that it will sell for two point five million dollars. Of money. And what possible reason would they have to lie to the public?

The Folger spends hundreds of thousands
per year on moodily-lit display cases alone.

A First Folio, in case your eyes just glazed over, is a copy of the first printing of the first collected works of Shakespeare first published back in 1623. It's full title is Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies because pretentiousness. There are, according to my exhaustive research of the first result that came up when I searched "how many First Folios," two hundred thirty-five of them still around. So they're rare, but not ludicrously so, although the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. owns like eighty three of them. I guess the difference between preservation and hoarding is funding.

One sold a couple of years ago for just under ten million, so the one going up for auction next month is, you know, less than. Maybe it's dog-eared or something? Incidentally, a Pokémon card sold for six million a while back. It turns out Logan Paul bought it, but he's kind of famously a dumbass, so I suppose things are worth whatever someone's willing to pay.

Pictured: the copy of the First Folio expected to go for less than half a Pokémon Card.

Pictured: a time-honored tradition.

Two point five million is certainly lot of money. But the First Folios are sole reason a lot Shakespeare's plays still exist. Scripts back then were jealously guarded by theatre companies because they didn't want someone else doing their plays. Pirates (in the intellectual property sense, not the "arrr! sense, although they had those too back in the sixteen hundreds), used to go watch a show and then try to write it down from memory to sell bootleg copies. Basically the early modern equivalent of recording movies on your iPhone.

Above: Shakespeare at his writing desk,
probably thinking about suing someone.

Copyright wasn't really a thing, so if you had a copy of say, Coriolanus, your troupe could put it on without paying a dime--or ha'penny or whatever--to the playwright and there wasn't really anything he could do about it. Maybe he could sue, and holy shit did Shakespeare love lawsuits, but he wouldn't have won and he himself stole all the time so it was probably just less work to not let your scripts get out there. So it's kind of weird that a couple Shakespeare's actor pals, John Heminge and Henry Condell, decided to publish the plays after his death.

Pictured: Heminge and Condell, seen here
holding large sums of posterity in their hands.

So why'd they do it? I'm not saying it's not a good thing that they did. Had Heminge and Condell not published the Folio, we would have never even heard of MacBeth and like eighteen other Shakespeare plays, but they did play right into the Jacobian theatre pirates' hands and or hooks. And they--what? A theatrical text pirate might have also had a hook for a hand. You don't know. Anyway, I guess they figured that since Shakespeare was dead, the best thing they could do was preserve his work. You know, for posterity. Or whatever. 

And now some rich is going to fork over another two point five million dollars for a book full of public domain plays which they will then stick this on a shelf in their mansion somewhere like Oprah's Klimt painting or those sealed copies of Super Mario Bros. idiots keep buying.

Hey, what if Logan Paul bought it, encased it in lucite and wore it around
his neck at a wrestling match. It'd be dumb, sure, but you've got to admit, it would
make for a more interesting story than it ending up with some Folio collector, right?