In 2006, an auction at Sotheby’s saw one of the few complete copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio go under the hammer, and at the end of the day, an anonymous bidder was poorer by $5.8 million, but in exchange for this astronomical sum, they now possessed one of the most important works in the history of English literature.

It is here at Sotheby’s that “The Book of William” begins, with a book that was once considered to be worth less than the paper on which it was printed. Paul Collins takes us from the crowded auction house back to early 17th century London when two aging actors first approached printer and bookseller William Jaggard to propose a new book, a collection of plays by their late friend and colleague William Shakespeare. These two actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, held a unique position in regards to Shakespeare. They had both been remembered in his will, and as the only surviving members of the King’s Men and stakeholders in the Globe Theatre, they were the only living individuals who held such intimate knowledge of Shakespeare and his plays. Using their own memories, a few rough drafts, prompt books from the Globe, and copies of previously printed plays, they began to compile the works of one of the greatest writers who ever lived.

From the First Folio’s unassuming beginning, Collins follows this remarkable work as it gets pushed aside for newer editions which at the time were considered improved by all the changes made. He details the various events over two centuries which take the First Folio from the back of the bookshelf to its rightful place as the definitive and most significant edition of Shakespeare’s works.

The journey that we follow with Collins takes us around the world in search of First Folios. We visit the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. home of the world’s largest collection of First Folios. Out of the 228 copies known to exist, the Folger possesses 79. From D.C. we travel to Meisei University in Tokyo which follows a distant second behind the Folger in number of Folios with 12. It is in Japan within the Kabuki adaptations of Hamlet and productions of Julius Caesar using Bunraku puppets that we see how far Shakespeare’s influence reaches across the globe.

In “The Book of William” Collins is able to distill a massive amount of research into an engaging and readable history. It is a fascinating account of a literary masterpiece, and is a must read for anyone who has ever tiptoed through the forest with Puck or mourned with Juliet when she finds her lover dead beside her. Don’t miss this incredible story.

Paul Collins has written a delightful little book on the history of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays published shortly after his death. It's pretty interesting to see how many of these books survived, and the sometimes intricate paths they've traveled. Along the way, he introduces us to the people who have purchased, collected, studied and preserved these books over the centuries - and an interesting bunch they are!

Don't read this book expecting a scholarly history. That's a good thing for people like me who are vaguely familiar with the folios and want to hear more. The Book of William is a good introduction to the subject for non-experts and Collins put together a bibliography for those who want to read more. ( )

A few years after William Shakespeare’s death, his business partners, actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, approached the printer William Jaggard with a proposal that he publish a complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Some of the plays had been printed individually in small editions called quartos, but Jaggard elected to print this collection in the larger folio format, and in 1623 the First Folio was born. Paul Collins’s The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World explains how the First Folio became among the most sought-after prizes in the world of book collecting.

Collins’s book is divided, suitably enough, into five “acts,” each of which describes a different time or place in the story of the Folios. It was interesting to hear what sorts of people owned the Folios and how these books were treated—or mistreated—by their owners. Samuel Johnson’s edition, for example, contains greasy fingerprints and a ring that appears to be from a teacup.

Although the Folios are Collins’ main focus, he sometimes drifts into other fascinating, but related avenues. He writes of other editions that gained and lost popularity, of how Shakespeare’s plays have been performed at various times, of the history of London printing and publishing, and of the vagaries of copyright law. The opening “act” is peppered with sometime humorous descriptions of books that were published around the same time as the First Folio.

Particularly interesting is the final act, which describes how the Japanese have embraced Shakespeare. This section includes one Japanese writer’s moving tribute to the power of literature to promote “mutual understanding and spiritual brotherhood” in the years just before World War II. But it also includes a more troubling passage that show how cultural imperialism can lead people to reject their own culture. And there are some wonderful examples here of how the Japanese have translated Shakespeare into their language and theatrical conventions.

Like much popular nonfiction, The Book of William lacks footnotes or endnotes. The Further Reading section tops 20 pages and gives details on where Collins got much of his information, which is useful, but I strongly prefer real endnotes. The book also lacks an index, which is not a devastating problem in such a short book, but it would have come in handy. These deficiencies limit this book’s usefulness as a work of reference or serious research, but, at only 243 pages, it serves as a nice introduction to the world of Shakespeare in print.

See my complete review on my blog. ( )

I'm always a little apprehensive about reading new books by my favorite authors: I get very excited about them, but then I worry that I might be disappointed, or something. In any case, I needn't have fretted about Paul Collins' latest, The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). It's pure bibliophilic gold - the best book about books - or a book, in this case - published in recent memory (perhaps since Nick Basbanes' A Gentle Madness in 1995).

The book is organized, appropriately enough, into acts and scenes; each act focuses on a separate century of the First Folio's existence, highlighting changes in its reputation over time and delving deeply into its production, use by later editors, and other aspects of the book's biography. Collins, with his knack for sussing out intriguing details about anything at all (Nancy Pearl has written "I'm pretty sure that if Paul Collins wrote a history of the Detroit phone book, I would read and enjoy that too"), makes the thrills of bibliographic research jump off the page.

Our author ably captures the vagaries of seventeenth-century publication practices and the brutal copyright battles of the eighteenth century (by the end of which Samuel Johnson and David Garrick had rehabilitated the First Folio's standing in the scholarly world and made the books collector's items). The nineteenth century brought the first scholarly census of First Folios (by Thomas Frognall Dibdin, in a footnote in his Library Companion), plus efforts to create photographic facsimiles of the book. Henry Clay Folger's obsessive collecting of Folios necessarily is treated at length (79 of the 228 known copies are at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC), and Collins concludes with a visit to the campus of Meisei University in Japan, which holds 12 First Folios of its own (and has a detailed website devoted to the books).

In visiting many of the sites which now house First Folios, Collins was able to view many of them himself (though not as many as the great Folio census-maker Anthony James West, who Collins also spends some time with in the book). His descriptions of the artifacts themselves are wonderful: Samuel Johnson's copy, covered with foodstains which seem to correspond remarkably with Johsnon's favorite plays, leads Collins to muse "Books bear a tangible presence alongside their ineffable quality of thought: they have a body and a soul" (p. 111). The "Meisei Folio" (one of the twelve copies in Japan) is in its original binding, and was heavily annotated by the man who was probably the book's very first owner (Collins suggests University of Aberdeen professor William Johnstone, some of whose books apparently went to the University of Abderdeen library - one hopes that perhaps a confirmed book of his also might contain marginalia which could be compared ...)

Collins also provides perhaps the most useful survey I've read of reproduction techniques and technologies, from entire resettings of type for the later handpress editions of the Folio (and later the smaller-format editions) to photographic facsimiles and now to digital scans which make examination, comparison, and collation of the Folios by scholars around the world easier than it's ever been (although in some cases removes the experience of the "genuine article"). The Hinman collator and other, more modern scholarly tools for comparing different copies of books even get their due!

In chronicling the creation, sale, study, and even destruction of First Folios from their genesis in 1623 to the 21st century, Collins has provided a pitch-perfect popular history of this amazingly rich and complicated story. This is a book that anyone with even a passing interest in Shakespeare, books, reading, or bibliography will want to devour. And the twenty-page section of further readings at the back is a superb contribution in its own right. I confess, I've already ordered a few things from it, including the first two volumes of West's census (of a projected five).

Read this book.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/... ( )