An unemployed antiques dealer, who had a taste for the high life and drove a Ferrari, was jailed for eight years on Monday for handling a stolen copy of a rare first collection of Shakespeare's plays.

Raymond Scott, 53, who posed as an international playboy despite having huge debts, walked into one of the world's leading Shakespeare research centers, the Folger Shakespeare library in Washington DC, with the 17th century book.

Staff at the library suspected the valuable book was stolen and called police.

The first folio edition, first printed in 1623 seven years after Shakespeare's death, is regarded as one of the most important printed works in the English language and fewer than 250 copies of the collection survive.

Scott was cleared last month of stealing the book from Durham University in 1998 but was convicted by a jury at Newcastle Crown Court of handling stolen goods and removing stolen property from Britain.

"You are to some extent a fantasist and have to some degree a personality disorder and you have been an alcoholic," said Judge Richard Lowden as he jailed him.

"It is clear that from the (psychiatric) report you are not suffering from any mental disorder."

During his trial, experts said the book had been damaged, with pages ripped out, reducing its value to about 1 million pounds ($2.1 million), the Press Association reported.

"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 told Scott.

"You wanted to fund an extremely ludicrous playboy lifestyle in order to impress a woman you met in Cuba.

The court heard that Scott, who owed 90,000 pounds on credit cards, had 25 previous convictions dating back to 1977, mainly for dishonesty.

He had claimed that there was a conspiracy among Shakespeare experts to convict him.