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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.
The Complete McAuslan by George MacDonald Fraser
Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation by Stephanie A. Mann
Fusiliers: The Saga of a British Redcoat Regiment in the American Revolution by Mark Urban
The Training Ground: Grant, Lee, Sherman and Davis in the Mexican War by Martin Dugard
Quarrel With The King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War by Adam Nicloson
Barbarians To Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered by Peter S. Wells
Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor by Eamon Duffy
The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss
How Rome Fell by Adrian Goldsworthy
The American Civil War by Sir John Keegan
The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander
Start with these, more to come…
“A satirist is a man profoundly revolted by the society in which he lives. His rage takes the form of wit, ridicule, mockery. Aldous Huxley puts satire somewhat far down the scale of literary esthetics, making the good point that “the pure comic genius must be a great inventor” on the order, say, of Aristophanes, who created worlds, as opposed to the “mere satirist,” who necessarily is rooted in this world. Almost by definition, the satirist does not create; he reacts to what exists with caricature and burlesque, two skills Max Beerbohm described: “Burlesque consists in the application of incongruity. Caricature consists merely in exaggeration. To burlesque a statue of Hermes, you need but put a top hat on his head. To caricature it you must exaggerate its every limb and feature.” A satirist may do anything he likes to that Hermes except carve it originally from the stone. Someone must do that for him. In the nicest sense, he is critic.
Our time’s first satirist is Evelyn Waugh. For thirty years his savagery and wit have given pleasure and alarm. His mixed dish is celebrated: the Bright Young People of the Twenties, the popular press, Africa’s political pretensions, death in Hollywood. . .all set down in a prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that its creator is fallible, or at least part American…”
John Mannering (The Baron) makes his first appearance in this volume. Lord Fauntley cannot help showing off both his daughter and the security under which his precious jewels are kept. Mannering finds himself attracted to both …. Money is tight and so he plans a burglary, but this fails and unexpected consequnces result. The relationship with Lorna Fauntley flourishes, and a series of high profile thefts and adventures ensure Mannering’s future, so he believes, until Lorna equates him with The Baron. One of the many further twists in this award winning novel occurs when the police appear to seek Mannering’s help, only to have everything turned upside down as the plot develops . .
Caricature on Rollison’s calling card
In the series of adventure novels by John Creasey, the Toff is the nickname of the Honourable Richard Rollison, a “U” crime sleuth. Sort of a more hard-boiled Lord Peter, he has no past history of crime himself, but he frequently bends or breaks the law in the course of his investigations.
Rolly to his friends, a wealthy bachelor, of around 40 years, living in Mayfair at 22 Gresham Terrace (not far from Sir Basil Seal) with his loyal valet Jolly, he is equally at home in the East End, where he is known as “Mr. Ar”, as he is in Mayfair.
The Toff sauntered through 60 books (Creasey published over 600 in his career) beginning with Introducing the Toff (1938) and ending with The Toff and the Crooked Copper in 1977. He bears some resemblance to Simon Templar but without the criminal past. Creasey is also the author of The Baron and Gideon of Scotland Yard books to name but a few.
Allard Special CLK 5 Roadster (production: 12)
Of course, being a Toff, Rollison owned an Allard, who was primarily a racing car manufacturer but also produced made to order automobiles. These special order automobiles featured large American V12 and V8 Ford powerplants in a light weight British sports car body. I mean, what else would a Toff drive?
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse KBE
October 15, 1881 – Feburary 14, 1975
Sir P. G. Wodehouse was the creator of, among others, the original and immortal Jeeves (the archetypal “gentleman’s gentleman”)
and his master Bertie Wooster. Affectionately known as Plum, Wodehouse is widely regarded as one of the greatest humorists of the 20th century, and is read and loved by fans worldwide. His prolific output included nearly 100 novels and collections of short stories, as well as plays, musicals and song lyrics.
“In a hundred years’ time `the kind of man who reads P.G. Wodehouse for pleasure’ may become synonymous with an extravagantly fastidious taste. And that indeed is as it should be.” [1939] – Evelyn Waugh
“…Puritans lack this sense of measured and temperate appetite. When sexual taboos were lifted, therefore, they found no further reason to refrain from indulgence. Since no virtue was at risk in our sexual transgressions, these ceased overnight to be transgressions. Thereafter, no proof of the damage done to children by premature experiment, no proof of the moral and medical chaos of uninhibited sexuality, could be heard. Puritanism turned an absolute no into an absolute yes. And it looked around for other pleasures that it could forbid, not because God was offended by them but because they offended the thing that had replaced God in the Puritan conscience — namely the Self. Any pleasure harmful to the self must now be subject to the same absolute condemnation as had been directed against the pleasures of sex. Hence the hysterical campaign against smoking, which has not taken the form of advising against something harmful, but the far more alarming form of condemning that thing as a sin. You can portray young people on the screen as engaging in sexual orgies, beating each other up, swearing and exhibiting every kind of nastiness. But you must never show a young person with a cigarette in his hand, since that will be condoning and encouraging sin. Portraits of famous smokers like Brunel, Churchill and Sartre have been doctored by the Ministry of Truth in order to remove the offensive item from between their fingers, and side by side with the poster on the school notice board that advises 12-year-olds on safe sex and free abortion, is the absolutist edict saying that thou shalt not smoke…”
Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. While a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility.
In 1918, Sassoon found himself one of the most famous young writers of the time, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and admired by Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster, while trying to adapt his poetry to peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the artistocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into his group of Bright Young Things who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate and fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon’s subsequent conversion to Catholicism.
From his famous war poems to the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls, and this work and its complex author are brilliantly illuminated in Max Egremont’s definitive biography.
28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964
