WASHINGTON, England – Raymond Scott sipped Dom Perignon from the jeweled champagne flute he carries in his briefcase. He was oddly jovial for a man just arrested on suspicion of stealing a prized 400-year-old volume of Shakespeare.

Mr. Scott, 51, who said he is innocent, described himself as an "amateur bibliophile" with a penchant for fine things, especially antiques.

In an interview in his northeast England hometown of Washington, he said he often travels away from his small brick home in a working-class cul-de-sac. He visited Washington, D.C., for the first time last month.

By his account, he excitedly left his suite at the Mayflower Hotel and walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill on June 16. He was seeking help authenticating an old Shakespeare volume he had just taken out of Cuba in his carry-on luggage.

Travel restrictions prohibited the Cuban owner from leaving the island, so Mr. Scott said he offered to bring it to the "epicenter" of scholarly work on Shakespeare, in the U.S. capital.

After Mr. Scott left the book at the Folger, an outside expert judged it to be a First Folio, a work stolen in 1998 from the University of Durham in a multimillion-dollar heist of some of the rarest books in the English language.

Mr. Scott said that although he lives 12 miles from the university, he has never been there.

Mr. Scott, a tall thin man, has never really had a job, but he said his mom (whom he referred to at one point as "Lady Bountiful") bankrolls his trips – and his gold Versace ring, his diamond Rolex and a succession of exquisite cars: a Rolls Royce, an Aston Martin, a Lamborghini, a silver Ferrari.

He was in his garden last Thursday, pruning roses for his mother, when British police arrived to arrest him. His town of Washington is the ancestral home of George Washington and includes the stone home of Washington's forebears.

Police questioned Mr. Scott for two days. They carted off more than 1,000 of his books and impounded his Ferrari before releasing him without charge. Durham police said he remains a suspect.

Mr. Scott said Stephen Massey, an independent rare books consultant and appraiser who examined the folio, got it wrong. He insists that his Cuban copy is not the Durham copy.

Mr. Massey, a former executive with Christie's auction house, said, "It wasn't too much of an Albert Einstein-like leap" to conclude that it was the Durham First Folio.

From a published census with detailed descriptions of existing First Folios, Mr. Massey knew the exact dimensions of the Durham First Folio. He knew that the table of contents had a handwritten notation in ink saying "Troilus and Cressida," written beneath the printed title "Henry VIII." He knew that the title leaf with the portrait of Shakespeare was missing.

All these details checked out, he said. The last page, which contained details that could further prove that the folio was the stolen Durham volume, was missing.

If Mr. Scott is worried that he will be charged, he doesn't show it. "I think I was preparing for this all my life, really. I just felt that I was destined for something a bit more than 9-to-5. I just felt that eventually, maybe I would make my mark on the world."

Mary Jordan and David Montgomery,

The Washington Post