The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered The World by Paul Collins
Shortly after the death of William Shakespeare in 1618, two of the Bard’s colleagues, the aging actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, set out to compile a complete edition of their old friend’s plays. Printed in 1623, it’s known today simply as the First Folio, and a single copy is worth millions. Now in The Book of William, English professor and well-known literary detective Paul Collins tells the story of the world’s most obsessively pursued book. It’s a breezy blend of travelogue and history broken into five acts that span the globe and the centuries. And so, beginning in an auction room in contemporary London, where we see one First Folio sell for 2.5 million pounds, we travel back in time to the 1750s, when the edition first began to be worth more than its original price of one pound: it crossed the border from used book to collectible. Then in 1824 one of England’s most celebrated bibliophiles, the Reverend Thomas Dibdin, described the location and condition of 30 specimens of First Folio. As a result it’s the only book whose individual copies can be consistently traced back through the 19th and often well into the 18th or even 17th century. Nowadays there are 230 known copies of the First Folio, and Collins travels around the world in search of them. He goes to the Folger Library in Washington DC, which houses oilman Henry Clay Folger’s collection of the printed works of Shakespeare, including 79 First Folios, kept together in an underground vault. And he travels to Japan, to see the Folio collection of Meisei University, whose collection of 12 numbers more than those owned by the British Library and New York Public Library combined. New copies still turn up. For Collins, one incident in 2004 reads like a fairy tale: A homemaker living near Manchester, surprised to be named the sole surviving heir of a late cousin she’d never heard of before, found among the elderly recluse’s effects a Folio that executors had assumed to be a facsimile edition. But it was the real thing—and a previously unknown copy. Collins pauses often in his journey to indulge in delightful digressions on a range of topics, from the longstanding relationship that the Japanese have with Shakespeare, to the fact that the experts who handle rare books never wear gloves: “The exquisite sensation of human touch is paradoxically vital to book preservation; wear gloves, and you are liable to misjudge the precise action of turning a leaf, and tear a page. Dirty, sweaty fingers keep these old volumes intact.” The Book of William is an enormously entertaining journey into a world where fragile paper and immortal words come together to create one of the world’s ultimate objects of desire.
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