Congratulations on it. Guest thank you. Coming for me thats praise indeed traded. Host you are kind indeed. Talk about the subtitle in your book if i may quote henry folgers obsessive hunt for shakespeares first folio. I think it might be helpful originally to talk about these two men the context of their times. Of course they were defying me two men both alike in dignity to quote from shakespeare but separated by 400 years and the Atlantic Ocean very different that they shared one thing, a shakespeare wrote his plays seven years after he died. Two of his friends decided to create a memorial volume to him and collected all of that they had available and published 36 have been known 38 plays that shakespeare had written and the two men are connected across time and across the ocean and its the book that saved half of shakespeares plays from obscurity became a fetish object for collectors and henry folger chairman of the Editorial Company wanted to own every known copy of his first olio. Host i thought of the gilded age is something of a very sacred term but in fact it was mark twain who coined the term and he was anything but complementary about those who lived in the gilded age. Guest he was quite pejorative about it and impart the question is what the new wealthy did to display their wealth. They had these magnificent mansions in new york and they had collections of art and books as well create they threw cash around europe and bought up european treasures and brought them back to the states. Henry folger was quite different than most of the gilded age characters that we know of jpmorgan, Henry Huntington and the like. He was quiet, unassuming, came from very modest means. Work his way up the run up the ladder at Standard Oil Company but most of all he never built himself a mansion. He never owned a house until he retired from standard oil. He was in a rented house in brooklyn with rented furniture. Lived a very modest life and kept secret his successive passion for collecting. Host he probably could have built a bigger house if he didnt spend so much money on the menu scripts. Guest undoubtedly that is true but he displayed some of his artwork at his home but most of the works that he did come up looks, manuscripts, musical scores, Musical Instruments costumes and anything related to shakespeare he looked at he studied and then when the house was full to the brim he would take them down into the basement wrapped them up and put them in a box and ship the box off to a warehouse. I have looked at receipt or storage fees for 30 years for some of the rooms that he rented so one by one he would fill up these warehouse rims with his treasures make an inventory, make a note of which boxes in which remand over 30 years accumulated room after room and a storehouse is semper and and manhattan. Host there is a tv show called porters and it wouldnt relate him to doubt that there is little of that in him. Guest if it interferes with your normal living, while henry folger certainly acquired things on the same scale only the things he acquired are very valuable and interesting so we dont call him a hoarder. Host not little boxes from Kentucky Fried Chicken from 10 years ago. You have a relationship with the collector as well. Your husband, james wants in a wellknown author and it did of collect your of other memorabilia. Guest a bit of the collector is an understatement. Part of my research on henry folger wasnt warmed by the fact that i did it with the collector and he has been collecting objects, manuscripts related to lincoln since he was 10 years old. He has amassed an enormous collection that i have not seen the full extent of yet because like henry james has had to put many of his objects into storage because there is no room for them. He has Storage Facilities in more than one state to. Host that you know about. Guest that i know of, right. Host james has a number of looks that particularly one of my favorites is manhunt the manhunt for john wilkesbooth after the lincoln assassination but lets go back in time a little further than that at the first folio. Could you talk about what a folio is alex its a phrase some of your readers may not need familiar with and the two men you referred to earlier the saviors. Guest sure. A folio refers to the size of the book. Its very large 13x8 depending on how its been shaped. Like a life magazine. Host but twice that. Guest that book would be closer to something that would be half the size of a folio. And what made it interesting was the folio sized conveys a gravitas of the work and at an prior the first folio shakespeare that size had been reserved for political and religious tracts of gravity. Not fiction, not literature and certainly not plays which were not regarded as literature. They were regarded as a femoral amusements for the masses. The first folio was a memorial volume that two of shakespeares friend john hemming and Henry Khan Dell put together is a tribute to their deceased friend. Host how long before had he passed away . Guest he died in 1615 in the first folio was published in 1623 so the i. D. Badge idea percolated after shakespeares death at which time by the time of shakespeares death only half of his plays have been published so they remained half that would not have been known to history had these two men not said put these all together in one volume and save them for posterity. Many of the manuscripts possibly the only copies of the manuscripts had gone up in flames at the globe theater in 1613. Host what are her thick story. Imagine what the world would have had if that didnt happen. Talk about how that fire them about in berman is sent out some tragedies we have had in contemporary america. Guest first folio said had a history of fire but more on that a little bit later. The globe theater was like the theaters in london trying to attract patrons. They held 1500 under american copyright law once an about the create something she owns the right to that. And upon their death the state would get that property, the value but shakespeare had licensed or sold the works to other people . Guest there was not copywriting great written until 1709, long after that so the way plays were paid for was the Theater Companies brought them out right. The Globe Theater Company would have paid for the place and they would have had the rights both to perform or publish. Host they could have presumably sold it. Guest mostly what they did was in fact exclusively but they did was they held them very closely. There was a single copy under lock and key at the theater for someone who is in charge of those manuscripts because they feared that other Theater Companies would get copies of them and take them out to other theaters and perform the place and not pay them any royalties them any row two so they figured we have the rights to hamlet we want to have the only copy and we dont want other Companies Performing hamlet. Host the movie shakespeare in love which contains some accuracy a huge amount of rivalry between the players of the theatrical companies a bit of play but am perhaps i was exaggerated in the film but we know it was popular entertainment extremely rivalrous. Guest there was a lot of Competition Among the Theater Companies. By the end of shakespeares career he retires back to stratford in 1511. By that time there are two major Theater Companies left in london and part of the reason for that relates back to the puritans prohibiting the production of plays. They didnt literally shut the theaters down but thats also demonstrated in shakespeare in love after the rebels shut the theater either for plays or later the puritans would say plays were an abomination against god pretending to be something they werent and with men playing the parts of women. They were even more upset about that. Host including that line that woman is a woman. Guest thats right. Host i was also fascinated as a armor business journalist and i covered the graphic arts industry to learn about jaggard the blind printer. Fascinating. How the first folio was instructed. Only 900 pages. Paper was a problem. Talk a little about that. Guest let me start at the end of the story. Without many copies of the first folio to compare its very difficult to draw the inference about how the book was actually printed. Having many Copies Available to compare sidebyside helps figure out how the copy is printed. Alone in the short of it is which by the way is a phrase from shakespeare is that the book was printed from the inside out. You didnt print print page one and then page two and page three. You printed them in little outlets and you started in the middle of the book at and then you set the type moving from the inside out. Very hard to understand that i will explain it in the book. This meant two things. One was that you the printer had to estimate how much tax would hit on the page to fit in this book would exactly if he had too much room not a problem you could add a printer and you could virtually doublespaced the text. That wasnt a problem. If you ran out of space on the other hand you might have to print for poetry as prose. You might have to cut a line from the speech of the bard to make the text fit. Host the type the typesetter says thats the last chapter and has to go. Guest it doesnt fit. Today if you are using microsoft word you would hit justify and everything would fit into the space you are allotted. Host one thing im curious about today we have hard book in paperback veaux and we have ebooks enduring as long as there are bits and bytes but the paper in many of todays books not highquality or of literary art volumes but it doesnt last very long. Talk about the paper and we will talk or about the presentday collection of the folios but talk about if you would what is the paper made of . Will it be in danger in five years, 10 years, 100 years . Guest the answer is the i, the paper that was used for printing the first folio was highquality from normandie france. Thats where the best paper came from. That is what jaggard bost used in printing their first folio and part of that was to say this is something important, something special. Something like a paperback book a quarter sized which would be half the size would have been printed on lowerquality paper. It would have been more riddle and acidic and more likely to degrade which is why quarter sized leis are much more prayer. And the folios have survived with pretty good numbers. They suffered hazards of time, fire insects, people. People tearing plays out because its more convenient to be able to carry one play around but all Things Considered a pretty good number of them have survived. Host one thing i found fascinating is this is a visit. Jaggard wasnt doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He had to estimate if it made sense to print axe number y number. How did they get into the stream of commerce . Guest they were sold mostly out of the printer shop. Host so printer bookseller. Guest printer oak cellar and all of the printing the book selling in the paper around st. Pauls cathedral in london. It would have been all of the bookshops. That was in part geographic access but in part planned by the crown because the crown wanted to know always been printed and what ideas were being disseminated so not only the Printing Presses but the booksellers would have been under the watchful eye of the crown. Host what would a first folio cost . Guest at time of publication would have cost a pound which is they have a sum of money. A quarter sized by contrast for a single play might have cost five or 6p so much cheaper. Posted the first copy of the press is the same as the 10,000th copy off the press. Is that because of the late or if they construction of the book itself . One is that corrections to the attacks were made while printing was going on. So you might be printing and page 64 for copy number 64 the preacher comes over and pulls a proof sheet off the press and that make corrections to it rated as the type reset to make those corrections of misspellings. Sometimes we put the actors name instead of the name of the character so we have to change that on the fly. The net through the sheet that was the other pages and later collated into copies. The new pages that were printed off would have the correct version so for every page there was a single proof sheet, some uncorrected pages and some corrected versions so if you multiply that by 900 pages 500 times every copy is slightly different. Host so was jaggard the one overseeing that . Guest hemings and were beforehand so they would have taken the sources available to them the already printed or already published versions of the plays that had been available. They edited them. They acted a new place with shakespeare and have been friends with him for a long time so they knew so they could look at for example one of the cordoz of hamlet and edit it into what we know from the first folio. They would use manuscripts that they would have had available to them as members of the Theater Company and their memorial reek creations would have been and how they had edited essentially these plays. Once the manuscripts were transcribed probably by ralph crane they got to the printer shop and then it was probably not so much he who is was blind at this time but his son who would have done the corrections. Host now what im thinking up his shakespeare to my surprise did not really become popular until sometime after his death. It was wellknown he was a playwright of course and people enjoyed his work but it was 140 years until his popularity began to soar. What happened to the first folios . Were they marginalize or do people recognize some babies would be truly valuable . Guest i dont know that collectors are they actors are the producers. Someday people will recognize how great this is. In fact over that. Of time we have the english civil wars in which the puritans took over parliament. And they prohibited plays which meant there were no new place being written and old plays were not being performed so was quite some time after the restoration that shakespeares plays came back to station by then publics taste to change a little bit. The producers of the play start to change the ending. Host ive had several movies made in hollywood that i know how that works. Guest victorious in the end. Host with a machine gun. Guest with a machine gun right. David berek was a very wellknown traffic actor. He edited the play himself producing them in london. For example romario and juliette he produced with happy endings are sad endings, you imagine . I think he cut two acts. Host the six tonight i believe. Guest the six tonight. By the time we get to 150 years after shakespeares death the play was quite different than what we remember. Its by going back to the first folio that we have a good idea of how they would have been performed at the time shakespeare was still alive. Host this brings up an interesting point primarily the first folio but there were other folios as well. I found it dating it was the third folio all of a sudden you see a copy of the third folio and open it up in seven new place only one of which was apparently shakespeare. Where did the others come from and talk a little bit about the other folios. Guest they were for folios altogether, like four editions. Each of them got further and further away from the additional text as hemings rincon del had edited the plays so they would have acted in these plays. There are hundreds of mistakes introduced into later folios and the first folio sells out in nine years. It is produced and by the fourth they add these plays to which you referred. Imagine if i could dig into my attic and say i want a manuscript of a fourth novel, a fifth novel and 20 years posthumously ive publish her work. They thought they could make a little extra money by saying the portfolio is better than the first. Will talk about henry folgers acquisition but they must have had some Intrinsic Value someone who would want to have the whole panoply if possible. Guest there are collectors like huntington and folger who wanted to own talk a little bit about that because people do find it fascinating. Guest its called the authorship did shakespeare really write those plays and its a group of people who have various candidates for whom they believe actually wrote the plays better tribute to shakespeare and there are a few things that are important. One is in his lifetime nobody doubted that shakespeare had written it. 150 years before someone said that this man write the play write the plays . At the go back a luminous evidence. There are no Grammar School records that show that he went to Grammar School there. He didnt go to university and britain is plays without a university education. The earl of oxford is one of the candidates and Christopher Marlowe is another and Francis Bacon was the most popular. Julia bacon in the 1800s wrote a book purporting that Francis Bacon had written, no relation to her by the way had written a place in there have not been anyone named William Shakespeare. Ms. Begin had an interesting story of her own. She went to angle that supposedly to research the authorship question. She didnt ask to do any research. She went to the town and observed the atmosphere but didnt do any interviewing. Host fiction writers do that a lot. Guest just to go there and explore the atmosphere. She didnt end so well how ever her book had been written by Nathaniel Hawthorne that he regretted for the rest of his life that he written the introduction because he hadnt read the book. She ended up in an insane asylum at the end of her life. That the alone doesnt mean that her hypothesis was incorrect however we have a lot of evidence that shakespeare existed and lived in london. He wrote plays. He was a contemporary of playwright fellow wrote about him as a playwright. Host he acted in the plays. Guest he acted in the place. The english were tremendously accurate recordkeepers and at a record of not only what plays were performed of course but you had written the plays and who had acted in them and shakespeare is mentioned in their dozens of times so elizabeth and james Queen Elizabeth and james th