The Millionaire and the Bard

March 23, 2015
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.

April 15, 2015

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2015
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 tediousbookdealers, scholars, antiquariansMays' first book is utterly enthralling thanks to her deep sympathy with the Folgers and her fascinated, unstuffy prose.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)