Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger by Stephen H. Grant

 

Summary (from the publisher): In Collecting Shakespeare, Stephen H. Grant recounts the American success story of Henry and Emily Folger of Brooklyn, a couple who were devoted to each other, in love with Shakespeare, and bitten by the collecting bug.

Shortly after marrying in 1885, the Folgers started buying, cataloging, and storing all manner of items about Shakespeare and his era. Emily earned a master's degree in Shakespeare studies. The frugal couple worked passionately as a tight-knit team during the Gilded Age, financing their hobby with the fortune Henry earned as president of Standard Oil Company of New York, where he was a trusted associate of John D. Rockefeller Sr.

While a number of American universities offered to house the collection, the Folgers wanted to give it to the American people. Afraid the price of antiquarian books would soar if their names were revealed, they secretly acquired prime real estate on Capitol Hill near the Library of Congress. They commissioned the design and construction of an elegant building with a reading room, public exhibition hall, and the Elizabethan Theatre. The Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on the Bard's birthday, April 23, 1932.

The library houses 82 First Folios, 275,000 books, and 60,000 manuscripts. It welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year and provides professors, scholars, graduate students, and researchers from around the world with access to the collections. It is also a vibrant center in Washington, D.C., for cultural programs, including theater, concerts, lectures, and poetry readings.

The library provided Grant with unprecedented access to the primary sources within the Folger vault. He draws on interviews with surviving Folger relatives and visits to 35 related archives in the United States and in Britain to create a portrait of the remarkable couple who ensured that Shakespeare would have a beautiful home in America.

Review: This work of non-fiction tells the story of a marriage, a lifelong hobby, and the history behind a one of a kind library. When two lifelong intellectuals married in 1885, they began buying and storing early works of Shakespeare. The frugal couple spent decades and thousands of hours researching, studying, cataloging, and purchasing early works. Their final grand ambition was to construct a library to house their collection on Capitol Hill near the Library of Congress. Unfortunately, Henry died without seeing the library built. But he left behind 92,000 volumes and a wife who dedicated her final years to ensuring their life project came to fruition. Today, the library houses 82 First Folios and 275,000 books and has over 100,000 visitors each year, a true testament to the passion of the Folgers. 

Henry Folger descended from a relatively prominent family. Benjamin Franklin's mother was a Folger. And Henry's uncle started the Folger coffee company. After graduating from Amherst College, he began working at Standard Oil Company of New York and eventually became a high ranking executive and worked closely with John D. Rockefeller Sr. Yet his salary and frugal lifestyle was not enough to support his book collecting pursuits. He invested and frequently took out loans to buy particular books. He was also quite secretive about his book buying activity, in attempts to keep his identity and hopefully the price of books down. His wife Emily was similarly, if not more, academically minded. She graduated from Vassar College and also received a Master's Degree in Shakespeare studies during a time period when almost no women had advanced degrees. The couple never had children but building their book collection was a totally absorbing mutual interest that seemed to take the place of offspring. 

It is difficult to fully comprehend the amount of time and money the couple devoted to their Shakespeare collection. Folger "maintained correspondence with "a prodigious army of booksellers: six hundred in all, one hundred fifty in London alone" (110). Once the couple decided on a location for their planned library, it took nearly nine years of patient real estate acquisition to acquire the nine rowhouses that previously sat on the plot of land where the library now stands. The couple never gave interviews or allowed access to the books. maintaining that secrecy was their best defense in continuing to acquire the best volumes and preferred to wait until they could be presented in the final library. 

The last couple chapters of the book deal mostly with details of the construction and management of the library, which all took place after Henry Folger's death. It was moving to see how determined Emily was to continue to support and fund the project even after her husband passed away. The Folgers' work and dedication created an incomparable collection that is a huge resource for scholars and historians alike, as well as a priceless treasure housed in the nation's capitol. The couple were notoriously secretive, which likely made details scarce but I do wish more had been shared about their marriage. For instance, no details were provided about how they met or their courtship. Overall a fascinating book and an interesting insight into what is now a collection that is available to scholars and visitors from around the world. 

Stars: 4