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The Book Of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered The World (2009)

by Paul Collins(Favorite Author)

4.01 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1596911956 (ISBN13: 9781596911956)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Bloomsbury USA

review 1: Who knew that following in the footsteps of a world-conquering first edition would be such an emotional experience. Starting at one and the same time at an auction house and the original printing house, Collins does an impressive job chronicling where the extremely limited edition came from, and whose grubby hands were lucky enough to hold on to them - turns out that Samuel Johnston, the creator of the first English dictionary, wins the messiest reader sweepstakes whereas another Johnson, the 16th century Prof of Mathematics William Johnstone gets the most-thorough annotator award as well as the happy distinction of being the first-known scholar of Shakespeare's plays. It got really emotional for me when Collins went to the land of tomorrow, Japan, to discover the future a... morepplication for the First Folio, at Meisei University in Tokyo. Not only home to the second largest collection of Folios after the Folgers' collection in Washington, but also that one of the scholar working on the digitization of the texts happens to be related to world-famous filmmaker Akira Kurosawa had me in tears. Someday the words that Shakespeare wrote, scratched onto parchment with his own quill, may be found, but I will stick to the argument that the stack of pages Condell and Heminges originally commissioned are as close as we will get to Shakespeare's mind.
review 2: An often well-written and concise history of the world's most obsessively-chronicled edition, from its beginnings in the minds of former King's Men Heminges and Condell to its modern übercollectibility. Unfortunately, Collins is kind of irritating. His attempts to weave in his wanderings around London were either clumsy or half-hearted, and his mysterious, clever little twists interrupted the flow of the narrative. And the Japanese Shakespeare culture sort of overwhelmed the last part of the book; not that it wasn't interesting, but it felt like a side trip. less

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