The millionaire and the bard Henry Folger's obsessive hunt for Shakespeare's first folio

Review by New York Times Review

SPINSTER: Making a Life of One's Own, by Kate Bolick. (Broadway, $16.) The author examines her lifelong quest for independence, weaving in the stories of female writers whose lives inspired her along the way. In their quests for solitude, Boiick and her heroines find pleasure in the alternatives to a familiar sequence: "You are born, you grow up, you become a wife." MY STRUGGLE: BOOK 4, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) The fourth volume of Knausgaard's six-part autobiographical novel finds 18-year-old Karl Ove newly arrived in a remote Norwegian village to teach and hone his writing. The narrative follows him as he works toward adulthood, with digressive ruminations on his adolescence, hopes for a girlfriend and youthful ambition. AMERICAN WARLORD: A True Story, by Johnny Dwyer. (Vintage, $17.) Dwyer tells the story of Chucky Taylor, the son of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian leader whose legacy of violence still scars the country. Chucky was largely neglected by his parents during his childhood in Orlando, but after a visit to Liberia in the 1990s, he joined the cycle of violence and torture there, and killed for sport during the civil war. THE UNFORTUNATES, by Sophie McManus. (Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) CeCe, the aging heir to a rubber fortune, is sent away to a sanitarium by her son and enrolled in an experimental drug trial, leaving him free to pour the family's wealth into a comically disastrous opera. For all the trappings of a familiar WASP story, CeCe's unexpected generosity and wit give this debut novel "its remarkable maturity and heft," Britt Peterson wrote here. THE MILLIONAIRE AND THE BARD: Henry Folger's Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio, by Andrea E. Mays. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) Mays, a historian, traces one wealthy American's impassioned quest to purchase as many copies of the First Folio, the crucial collection of Shakespeare's plays published in 1623, as he could. Over his lifetime, Folger amassed a holding of more than twice the number of the copies known to exist in England. GIRL AT WAR, by Sara Novic. (Random House, $16.) Ana Juric, this novel's protagonist, was 10 years old when the violent breakup of Yugoslavia reached her hometown, Croatia's capital. The ensuing horrors, on both a national and personal level - Ana's parents were killed, and she was conscripted as a child soldier - leave her as the "sole repository of family memory," Anthony Marra wrote here. THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, by Steve Fraser. (Basic Books, $18.99.) The current economic chasm in American society amounts to what Fraser sees as a reprisal of the Gilded Age, with a difference: 200 years ago, inequality mobilized citizens to protest, while today that impulse has stalled. Fraser investigates why.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* For half-a-century, Henry Folger was near and, later, at the top of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire. Yet he and his wife, Emily, rented in Brooklyn until he retired. Despite their wealth (nothing like Rockefeller's, but . . .), they were unostentatious, Henry especially loathing all publicity. They took their annual voyage to England on a slow boat skippered by a friend who shared their passion for Shakespeare. They expended their resources on collecting Shakespeariana, especially copies of the earliest official edition of the plays, the First Folio of 1623. By the time ground was broken for Washington, D.C.'s famed Folger Shakespeare Library, their collection was so large that to this day it hasn't been completely cataloged. Mays' chronicling of the amassment of that library focuses on Henry far more than Emily as he stalks and bags copy after copy of the First Folio as well as a few even more valuable Shakespearean volumes, such as the first collection of the plays made by binding together the paperback quartos of individual plays (only two copies of this edition are extant). Though its cast consists of people one might ordinarily consider gray and tedious bookdealers, scholars, antiquarians Mays' first book is utterly enthralling thanks to her deep sympathy with the Folgers and her fascinated, unstuffy prose.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Economist Mays's debut is effortless in its unadorned storytelling and exacting in its research, recounting the lives of William Shakespeare and his most devoted collector, Henry Clay Folger (1857-1930). Shakespeare's First Folio, "the book of man on earth," is the most expensive book in the world, and for Folger, president and later chairman of Standard Oil of New York, the source of an obsession that extended beyond his life-the Folger Shakespeare Library opened two years after his death. Folger's untiring intellectual pursuit speaks to both the resounding importance of Shakespeare's work and the mores of Folger's Gilded Age era, which prized the ambition that led Americans to become self-made millionaires. The book is evocative in its characterizations of both the deified bard and dedicated bibliophile, finding its structure in the parallels between these two ambitious yet mysterious men. While the details of Folger's travails to find the First Folio can sometimes weigh heavily on the long narrative, the page-turning detective story-winding through dusty library shelves and behind the closed doors of antiquarian trading-speaks to anyone with a love of literary history. Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Similar to Stephen H. Grant's Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger, Mays's (economics, California State Univ., Long Beach) book focuses specifically on the story of Henry Folger's first acquisition of a major Shakespeare collection and uses it as the point of departure for what becomes an obsession-Folger's quest to own as many copies as he could of William Shakespeare's First Folio. While the story of the making of the first edition of collected works by the bard's fellow shareholders John Heminges and Henry Condell and the tale of how close Shakespeare's plays came to being lost altogether is fascinating, it is especially illuminating to see such an unprecedented project anatomized so minutely. With many people still speculating about the eventual disappearance of all books, this voyage back to within 125 years of the dawn of printing history seems especially poignant-as we no longer need persuading that tomes are precious and have never been so aware of their ephemerality. -VERDICT Recommended for all book lovers, Shakespeare fans, and anyone interested in America's Gilded Age. [See Prepub Alert, 11/24/14.]-Jenny Brewer, Helen Hall Lib., League City, TX © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An exacting inquiry into Shakespeare's First Folio and the art of extreme book collecting, demonstrated by the life of a pathological bibliophile. In her debut, lifelong Shakespeare enthusiast Mays (Economics/California State Univ., Long Beach) meticulously details the "curiously unexamined" life of millionaire businessman Henry Clay Folger (1857-1930), an obsessive, discriminating Bard collector who acquired an extremely rare, inaugural edition of dramatic works known as Shakespeare's First Folio. He then went on to spend millions on other collectible tomes with the intent to amass as many Folio copies as possible and enact text comparisons with each"to subject them to meticulous comparative analysis." Mays begins with Shakespeare's rise to prominence among London theater and literary circles. His death in 1616 left half of his oeuvre as yet unpublished until unauthorized attempts at collecting these works produced the much-pirated "Pavier Quarto" (False Folio), followed by a modest, laborious printing of the First Folio and subsequent editions thereafter. Mays describes this undertaking in vivid detail, and she confidently presents Folger as a driving force behind the eventual success of industrial giant Standard Oil, a position that would provide him with the wealth to pursue his obsessive passion. However, the impetus of Folger's burgeoning interest in Shakespeare's Folios remains a mystery even to Mays, whose scrupulous research is evident from her revealing closing notes and bibliography. Folger's proliferating "Foliomania," which endured throughout the early 1900s until his death, comprises the remainder of the book. Without becoming fiddly, the author assembles Folger's "forgotten" lifetime through chapters brimming with biographical specifics (some known, some fascinatingly obscure) of his and wife's substantial estate, and she honorably resurrects this affluent, rapacious eccentric who became wholly consumed with the acquisition of a priceless bonanza of Shakespeariana. A methodical opus comprising intensive memoir and inquisitive investigation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The Millionaire and the Bard Prologue "He was Not of an Age, but for All Time!" --BEN JONSON IT STARTED, as many great obsessions do, with an unremarkable incident, an encounter between a man and a book. It happened during the Gilded Age, in New York City. Henry Clay Folger was a recent graduate of Columbia Law School living in rented rooms, working as a clerk at a local oil refinery, and trying to make his way in the world. He walked into Bang's auction gallery in Manhattan with, as he later admitted, "fear and trepidation." 1 The books to be sold that day overflowed from the shelves. As an undergraduate at Amherst College he had studied literature, including Shakespeare, whose plays he "read . . . far into the night." 2 He had continued reading for pleasure ever since. He saved every book he ever read. He had always been a collector. At college, he made scrapbooks for his most trivial ephemera, including theater and lecture tickets. But his hoarder's impulse was still in search of a grand obsession. Henry had never bought a rare book. The closest he had ever come was when he purchased a gift for his young wife. She shared his literary enthusiasm, so he had bought her an inexpensive facsimile of the First Folio of the collected plays of William Shakespeare. He had never seen a real one. The old book that caught his eye at Bang's was not, however, a coveted First Folio published in 1623, but to his amateur's eye it seemed close. It was an authentic Fourth Folio, printed in 1685; it was a less valuable edition than a First. Its antiquity excited his fancy. He bid on the book until the auctioneer hammered it down to him for $107.50. He asked if he could pay in installments. When he took it home, he and his wife gazed at the familiar engraving of Shakespeare on the title page. They turned the thick, durable rag paper pages, and savored the familiar words of the plays they both loved, and which they had read many times before in cheap, modern editions. Holding that old book in his hands changed Henry Folger's life, just as the publication of its first edition more than two hundred fifty years earlier had come to define its author's. Soon, Folger found himself in the thrall of obsession. The young man who could barely afford a hundred-dollar book would spend a year's salary for another one, and devote the rest of his life, and millions of dollars, to chasing the rare books he coveted. The apprentice clerk would rise in the world of Gilded Age titans--John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Henry Huntington--and join them in a frenzied competition for some of the rarest books in the world. Soon, he would own more volumes than he knew what to do with. They would overwhelm his shelves, his rented rooms, and then his home, and fill secret warehouses and storage lockers to their ceilings. Before long, Henry Folger's books would dominate his life. But in this ocean of books he prized one above all the others. Today, it is the most valuable book in the world. And, after the King James Bible, the most important. In October 2001, one of the First Folios sold at Christie's for more than six million dollars. No more than 750 copies were printed, and two-thirds of them have perished over the last 391 years. Around 244 of them survive, and most of those are incomplete. Shakespeare's First Folio--Folger wanted to own them all. As Victor Hugo wrote, "England has two books, one of which she has made, the other which has made her--Shakespeare and the Bible." Published in London in 1623, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies revolutionized the language, psychology, and culture of Western civilization. Without the First Folio, published seven years after the playwright's death, eighteen iconic works, including Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest would have been lost. Recognizing that every folio was superficially the same book but that each surviving handmade copy was in fact unique with its own idiosyncratic typographical fingerprint, binding, and provenance, Folger decided that the only way to rediscover Shakespeare's original intentions and language--what he called "The True Text"--was to buy every copy he could find and subject it to meticulous comparative analysis. Believing that the mysteries of the folios could be fully understood only in the context of their time, he amassed an equally stupendous collection of artwork, books, letters, manuscripts, and antiquities from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. He wanted to own Shakespeare. And he did. He came to own more copies of the First Folio than anyone else in the world, more than even the British Library, the ultra-repository in Shakespeare's homeland. Folger collected more than twice the number of copies known to exist in all of England. How this happened is more than the tale of one passionate bibliophile. It is a story of the Old World giving way to the New, of the power of modern economics and transatlantic trade, and of the irresistible democratization of taste. Everyone knows William Shakespeare. He was born in 1564, and died in April 1616. He wrote approximately thirty-nine plays 3 and composed five long poems and 154 sonnets. He failed to publish his collected works--during his lifetime plays were considered ephemeral amusements, not serious literature. By the time of his death he was retired, was considered past his prime, and by the 1620s many of his plays were no longer regularly performed in theaters. No one--not even Shakespeare himself--believed that his writings would last, that he was a genius, or that future generations would celebrate him as the greatest and most influential writer in the history of the English language. Harold Bloom has argued that Shakespeare transformed the nature of man and created modern consciousness. If that is so, then the First Folio--not the works of Darwin, Marx, or Freud--is the urtext of modernism. If the Bible is the book of God, then Shakespeare is the book of man on earth. We use the words he invented, we speak in his cadences, and we think in his imagery. The epitaph that fellow poet Ben Jonson penned for William Shakespeare proved to be prophetic: "He was not of an age, but for all time!" Without the First Folio, the evolution from poet to secular saint would have never happened, and the story of that book is an incredible tale of faith, friendship, loyalty, and chance. Today, few people realize how close the world came, in the aftermath of Shakespeare's death, to losing half of his plays. Henry Clay Folger, however, remains one of the least-known industrial titans of his time. Folger, from the twilight years of the Gilded Age through the comet's arc of the Roaring Twenties, built the greatest Shakespeare library in the world, transporting it across the Atlantic piece by piece and hoarding it in thousands of unopened shipping crates, locked away in secret New York warehouses. And yet his life remains curiously unexamined. He is a forgotten man. This is a story of resurrection, of a magical book and two men, an American millionaire and an English playwright--the man who coveted the First Folio, and the man who composed it. Excerpted from The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger's Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio by Andrea Mays All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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