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The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World

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This is an extraordinary book. Written in an appealingly informal style, with clarity and grace, but with a solid underpinning of research and rigorous scholarship, this is a superb examination of the history of the famed "First Folio," the massive volume published in 1623 that collected the plays of William Shakespeare. Paul Collins has worked a small and amazing miracle with this book. He has managed to weave together an exploration of the early publishing history of Shakespeare's plays; an account of changing views of Shakespeare's work and how to edit it for publication; a story of the brawling literary world of eighteenth-century England; a tale of the rise of book-collecting and the antiquarian book trade; a sparkling anecdotal census of existing copies of the First Folio; wonderful biographical sketches of such vital figures in his book as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's actor friends who edited the First Folio, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Henry Clay Folger, Charlton Hinman; and his own memoir of his quest for the First Folio. I literally could not put this book down, and I am enthusiastically recommending it to everyone I can think of.

Ben Johnson said of his fellow playwright and friend, "He is not of an age, but for all time," but if it weren't for two of his business partners and fellow actors, the world might not know William Shakespeare at all.

If you have ever been in an English lit class, you've read Shakespeare. You may have read him more than once. I've read and appreciated his work many times, seen several stage productions, even a couple of movies. Never have I given a thought of how the most important literary works in the English language made it to us from seventeenth-century London.

In his book, The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World, author Paul Collins takes us on a journey through the nearly four centuries of First Folio history. After the Bard's death in 1616, John Heminge and Henry Condell, in an effort to preserve their friend's work had his plays printed in a single collection we now know as the First Folio. It wasn't a terribly easy task. When Heminge and Condell began amassing the plays shortly after Shakespears's death, very few papers written in his own hand remained...no complete plays, only rough drafts. There were some plays that had been published in quarto, so the men had to make do with what they had and what they remembered. They were the only two men alive who had walked the boards with Shakespeare, had spoken the lines he had written for them and had taken his direction. They alone could identify his work from forgery...and there was forgery. Through dedication and perseverance born of friendship, Heminge and Condell accomplished the most monumental feat in the history of literature. Without the First Folio, eighteen of the plays would have joined Cardenio and Love's Labors Wonne and been lost forever...As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Tempest and Twelfth Night among them.

After the story of the birth of the First Folio, Collins leads us on a four-hundred-year chronicle of the world's most valuable book. Of the approximately one thousand that were printed, there are about two hundred and twenty copies that are known to still exist. There is the inevitable copy found in a dusty attic. Some whose owners left their names inside so that their history is well documented. Others were not so fortunate. One was lost in the Great Chicago Fire, and there's at least one at the bottom of the North Atlantic.

Definitely 4 1/2 stars. I would have given it five had the book included a map of the areas of London that were mentioned for those readers like me who need the visual. Otherwise, Collins takes what could be an extremely dry history and makes it enjoyable and personal. I've not read any of his work before, but I look forward to reading more.

You don't have to be a Shakespeare expert to enjoy this fine new work by Paul Collins. This informal and highly engaging study of the First Folio is wide ranging, roaming from London auction houses to Tokyo theaters, but wherever it goes its amusing and intriguing.

The First Folio was produced in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, by men who had known and acted with him. Although Shakespeare was not to be universally recognized as "England's greatest playwright" until more than a century later, the First Folio sold well and was followed by later reprintings, with additions and subtractions, over the next few decades.

As with everything Paul Collins writes, he provides a somewhat discursive but extremely entertaining story. I enjoyed reading about the efforts being made to trace the original First Folios, and was amazed to discover that so many of them are still in existence with proven paper trails. (On a personal note, I was thrilled to see that one of my own ancestors, Sir Edward Dering, was one of the first purchasers of not one but two First Folios!) I also liked the many "subplots" in the story, particularly the chapters on Samuel Johnson and his edition of the plays. It was also fascinating to read about Shakespeare's role in helping Japan modernize during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to learn that the Japanese still have high regard for the Bard. Finally, I was filled anew with admiration for the painstaking work of editors who have analyzed every line of the First Folios in the ongoing effort to present the plays as Shakespeare intended.

I will keep The Book of William in my "hard to classify but cherished" section of my library, and I'm sure most others who read it will do the same.

The most revered author in the world never bothered to publish the works for which he is famous. Today, only ten words are known to exist in his hand: his name, written five times. The only man we can be certain he disliked was the guy who published 36 of his plays about seven years after his death (and he was blind and died a few weeks before the First Folio finally came off the press).

We know more about what happened to that print run of 750 copies than almost any book since, though it is nearly four centuries old. Copies disappeared in the Great London Fire of 1666 and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and another sank to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1854 when the SS Arctic rammed a French steamer off Newfoundland. A copy recently sold at Sotheby's for $5.8 million.

Paul Collins, who teaches at Portland State University, edits an imprint of McSweeney Books, and does commentaries on NPR as Weekend Edition's literary detective, has made a specialty of digging up forgotten books and obscure history.

His first book for general readers, Banvard's Folly, offered entertaining portraits of "people who didn't change the world." Subsequent tomes tracked the purloined remains of Thomas Paine, traced the history and diagnosis of autism, and visited Hay-on-Wye - a Welsh village of 1,500 inhabitants and, count 'em, 40 antiquarian bookstores.

As different as their subjects may appear - Collins once said "there is no way they are reproducible [by potential competitors] because they are so chaotic" - at least one thread connects them all: a love of books, and what they say to and about us.

Shakespeare's First Folio hardly qualifies as "forgotten," yet its 386-year history is perfect for Collins's peripatetic narrative style. The five "Acts" and 18 "scenes" of The Book of William take the reader from St. Paul's Churchyard in the 1580s, where future printer William Jaggard got his start with a bookselling stall, to the windowless, fireproofed, temperature- and humidity-controlled vaults of Meisei University in Japan, which contain a dozen First Folios, worth upwards of $50 million.

Along the way, we learn that paper in Jaggard's time was made from handkerchiefs, blouses, table linens, and undergarments; witness the 1720s literary war between Alexander Pope and Lewis Theobald (yeah, that's right - who? - but Collins dubs him the victor) over how to edit Shakespeare; meet various First Folio hunters, dead and living; and examine kabuki and manga Shakespeare.

Collins is pleasant company on these journeys through musty and scholarly byways; fans of Bill Bryson might find the style similar. Musing on the vagaries of theatrical fashion after the Bard's passing, he writes: "Puck and Titania couldn't get themselves arrested in the 1620s." The spongy green carpet of DC's Folger Library "makes you want to either tackle a Milton scholar or throw a long bomb down the forty yards to the reference desk."

This is great, informative fun.

The author has such a light, chatty style (and such an obvious enthusiasm for his work) that the arcane minutia about early book publishing practices goes down like sugar plums.

When I ordered the book, I was writing a young adult novel about a young boy's time-travel back to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre during a performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and I thought this would offer some needed background. Wow! It was so much more captivating than I expected it to be. The personalities involved in promoting the First Folio's rise to prominence are fascinating, from Jaggard to Heminge and Condell all the way down to Henry Clay Folger -- just wonderful stories. This book has made me add a visit to the Folger Library in Washington to my Bucket List.

A most enjoyable read. It was so much fun to read that I limited myself to 2 or 3 chapters per day so it would last longer. I am definitely exploring Paul Collins's other titles, as this is the first one I've read, having noticed a review in the New York Times. Bravo!

I found the book's title somewhat misleading. I was expecting much of The Book of William to be about how, during the past four centuries, the First Folio greatly affected generation after generation, and changed the way we see the world as well as the way we read literature. After all, the rest of the book's title read: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World.

Instead, the first half of this book is an easy-to-read history about the publishing of different editions of Shakespeare's plays from 1623 to the late 18th Century.

The second half of the book is about the fate of some of the First Folios and how they were acquired. Finally, Mr. Collins describes his visits to the two libraries holding the largest number of Folios: the Folger Library in Washington D.C. and the Meisei Library in Japan. and describes the condition of several Folios, and how they were treated or mistreated over the years.

One of the things that makes this book so enjoyable is the way Mr. Collins brings many characters to life, two of whom are Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson.

In the pages of this book, we are often reminded that book publishing and collecting is, in the end, more about interesting people than about anything else.

And so I enjoyed learning about the world of antiquarian books.

The Book of William fueled my appetite to learn even more about the First Folio - how it was printed and what happened to many of the copies - so I was left with the feeling I wanted to known even more.

Therefore, I wonder: Did Mr. Collins leave a lot of the story out? I can't answer the question. I am, however, grateful I read this book, though I think illustrations and photographs would have improved it.

If you like Shakespeare and/or have an interest in book collecting you'll love this book.

This book is enjoyable reading for anyone who loves Shakespeare. The author took pains to make the book accessible to the average reader. I agree with the other reviewer that some diagrams/maps would have been helpful.

Some of us love to imagine what the world looked like in Shakespeare's time. I read this great book over a few days with the companionship of a rhubarb pie. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

A great book for anyone who loves Shakespeare, and a great gift for any enthusiast.

Recommended.

I've heard of Shakespeare's First Folio, of course, but I never would have imagined that there was so much interesting information to know about it. This slim volume was a delight to read. It is not about the plays or the playwright. It is literally about the printed book itself.

And what a story. As Paul Collins points out, there are only five printed books that he knows of where someone, usually someones, has/have gone to the trouble to do a census of the first printing. That is, somebody has tried to catalog how many original 1st printings there are, and where they're located:

Gutenberg Bible
Audubon's "Birds of America"
Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus"
Darwin's "Origin of the Species"
and, last but not least,
the First Folio of plays by William Shakespeare

In 1824, bookseller Henry Bolen attempted to list all extant First Folios, and came up with 39. By 1902, after another's more exhaustive search (it is amazing how many libraries didn't even know they had a First Folio), the count rose to 158.

Currently, Anthony West, who's published two out of five projected volumes on the First Folios, puts the number at 230. He's actually seen all but two of those.

Granted, most of the First Folios are not in the best shape, with pages missing (usually clumsily replaced with poor facsimiles), food stains, tears, annotations, and even a doodling student's handwriting practice.

But a First Folio, though printed after Shakespeare's death, does have the advantage of being compiled and edited by two actors turned businessmen, who actually worked with Shakespeare, talked with him, drank with him, said these very lines upon the stage with his direction. Not to mention simply the 400 year-old age of the books. To hold a First Folio in your hands has to be an awesome experience. It would make my favorite Shakespeare "experience" pale: On a trip to England, we visited the Globe Theater reproduction, only 100 feet from where the original Globe once stood. On leaving, we made for the 400 year-old The George Inn, where Shakespeare had been known to sample the wares. I trod where Shakespeare tred. Whoo-hoo!

I hope I'm not making "The Book of William" sound like a boring read. It isn't. It is not dense dry scholarship; it is light and frequently amusing. I got a kick out the explanations of the different methods for collating differing old printings of Shakespeare's plays (there were four folios, I think, and, after all, the First Folio didn't have all the plays). The "Wimbledon Method" is, for example, where you place two page threes, from two different folios, on the table in front of you. Then you compare each word and each comma and each space by swinging your head back and forth between the pages.

Fortunately for the scholar, Collins also describes the two machines/methods built for the same purpose, not to mention computer scanning comparisons, which, so far, cannot begin to match the human eye in finding differences.

The stories of the collectors and collaters and editors make totally fun reading. This is an engaging book, and informative. Very recommended.

Until I saw this book recommended very recently in paperback by the New York Times, I had never heard either of the book, or its author, Paul Collins. I have read other reviews of the book on Amazon, and I have searched Paul Collins's name. It seems he has published a number of works that have been well-received. Please add this new book to the list. I had no idea that the history of Shakespeare's First Folio and of its various collectors of copies thereof over a 400-year period could be made so interesting. It takes the reader from 1623 London as far as 21st century Tokyo, and Paul intersperses the breadth of his historical knowledge with descriptions of the various places he has obviously visited to assist his discussion of his chosen topic. As someone who has had intimate knowledge of the west end of London, I feel this book gives me an even better insight than I ever had before into some arcane areas of the city of my birth.

Finally, and surprisingly, this book is a real "page-turner". I am easily bored by books that are not well written: I could not put this one down. Buy it! You won't be sorry.

I think this book is a must read for those of us who love old books and Shakespeare but are not scholars. The author describes what printing was like in early 17th century, and how books were bought, sold, and cataloged. From a book sale at Sothebys to a Japanese university, he tracks the ownership of first folios and gives a sense of that rarified world where people have fortunes to spend on books. I thoroughly enjoyed it.