A SELF-STYLED international playboy convicted of handling a priceless stolen Shakespeare First Folio has likened prison to an expensive health club.

Raymond Scott, who was jailed for eight years in August, is in Castington, Northumberland, where he spends time completing a motor mechanics course, reading, exercising, playing chess and watching TV.

The 53-year-old, of Wingate, County Durham, was last year cleared of stealing the 380-year-old folio from Durham University’s Palace Green Library, but was jailed for handling stolen goods and removing stolen property from the UK.

Scott led a bizarre double life – parading as a wealthy international businessman but, in reality, living on benefits in the former council house he shared with his mother in Washington, Wearside.

The man famed for drinking vintage champagne and smoking fine Cuban cigars said it took him a while to get used to life without the luxuries, but said it was doing him good.

He added: “I am looking at my time as extensive rehab. I was given a course of librium (a drug used to combat alcohol withdrawal symptoms) at first to get over my drinking, and I have never felt so fit.

“I was on Prozac (an anti-depressant) too, but not any more. The excessive drinking of the past few years, especially those two awful years on bail, were beyond enjoying alcohol and all to do with decline and failure.

“There are people who pay thousands to go to places for the treatment I have received inside which I, of course, get for nothing.”

Scott was accused of stealing the 1623 folio and concealing it for nearly a decade before producing it at the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington DC, in the US, in June 2008, when he ran out of money.

He said he had acquired it in Cuba, the home of his fiancee, Heidi Garcia Rios, a 23-year-old nightclub dancer.

But, despite the book being “damaged, brutalised and mutilated”, experts at the Folger recognised it as the stolen copy and called in the FBI.

After he was sentenced at Newcastle Crown Court, he briefly spent time in Durham Prison before he was transferred to Acklington, Northumberland, in September, where he started a course in bookkeeping.

He said: “I visited the library, amongst much ribaldry. For a joke, I concealed the complete works of you-know-who underneath my prison jumper and made off before I was apprehended by one of the guards, who got in the spirit of it.”

He was later transferred to Castington, where he continues to work on appeals against his conviction and length of sentence.

His book about the case, Shakespeare and Love, is due for publication on the Bard’s birthday – April 23. There have been about 200 pre-orders of it, 40 of which came from the Royal Shakespeare Company.

As for the future, he says: “My motto – keep calm and carry on appealing.”