I recently read a "literary detective story", a book called The Millionaire and the Bard, by Andrea E. Mays. It's about the career, rising from a low level clerk to a Captain of Industry, of a man named Henry Folger, becoming a very top level executive of Standard Oil. Folger and his wife were obsessed with Shakespeare, and especially with the First Folio. The publication of which in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, saved for the world about eighteen of the great man's plays, which had never before been published and but for the First Folio would have been lost, along with the best versions of all his other plays.

    Folger and his equally dedicated and knowledgeable wife, over an unrelenting search of maybe 40 years, gathered a collection including about (as best I recall) 79 copies of the F.F. (about 30% of the known surviving copies in the world), and many others of the later Folios and the Quartos and a great quantity of other Shakespeariana.

    The Folgers' huge collection of plays, playbills, paintings, etc., resides in the Folger Shakespeare Library, next to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. It's where any serious Shakespeare Scholar really has to go to study the early publications of the plays, critical reviews, playbills, and many later books dealing with them and Shakespeare himself.

    Now that I've told you too much and not enough, my description might sound to you like a dry book, but I didn't find it so. In addition, it put me onto another fascinating book dealing with Shakespeare, which I'll address in another post.

Dave Oesterreich