The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio

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)