Police have recovered a 400-year-old volume of Shakespeare stolen in England a decade ago and worth millions of dollars (pounds) after a man walked into a library in Washington, D.C., and asked to have it authenticated.

Police in Durham, northeast England, said Friday they had arrested a 51-year-old man over the theft of the First Folio edition of 1623, which scholars consider one of the most important printed books in the English language. It was among seven centuries-old books and manuscripts stolen in December 1998 from a display case at the Durham University library.

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he mystery began to unravel two weeks ago when a man brought the First Folio to Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library and asked to have it verified as genuine. The man claimed to be an international businessman who had bought the volume in Cuba. "We have people come to us from time to time with questions about books," said Garland Scott, head of external relations at the library, one of the world's leading centers of Shakespearean research. "It's not every day that someone walks in with a First Folio."

Scott said library staff members soon had their suspicions raised. The book was largely intact, but the end boards and some early pages -- which bore marks that would have identified them as the Durham copy -- had been removed.