A fantastic book and i enjoyed it thoroughly. Its a pageturner a thrilling adventure permanently accessible. Congratulations on it. Guest thank you, coming from you that is praise indeed. Host talk about the subtitle of your book if i may quote henry folgers obsessive hunt for shakespeares first folio but i think it might be helpful originally to talk about those two men in the context of their times. Of course if i made they were two men look alike in dignity quoting from shakespeare and yet separated by 400 years and the Atlantic Ocean very different that but they share one thing, a passion for in one case writing and the other collecting but put them in the context of their lives if you would please. Guest sure. Shakespeare was writing around the 1600s. His life was 20 years before, 20 years after the 1600. During the rain of elizabeth and james the first. He was a wellknown playwright poet. He wrote sonnets and he was also a businessman. Here is a shareholder in the globes Theater Company in london and landowner in very wellknown in his time for being a playwright and a businessman. Henry folger was the chairman the first president and chairman of the board of the Largest Corporation in the world and most reviled corporation in the world as well during the gilded age. Shakespeare wrote these plays. Seven years after he died to does this friends decided to create a memorial volume to him and collective all of the plays that he had written and the two men are connected across time and across the ocean in that this book has saved half of shakespeares play from a security became a fetish object for collectors and henry folger chairman of Standard Oil Company wanted to own every known copy of his first folio. Host theres Something Interesting in your book. I thought of the gilded age as a very secret term referring to it that way but in fact it was mark twain who coined the term and he was anything but complimentary about those who lived in the gilded age. Guest thats right, he was quite pejorative about it and in part the question is what the new wealthy did to display their wealth but these magnificent mansions in new york and they had collections of art and books as well. They threw cash around and bought up european treasures and brought them back to the states. Henry fulcher 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, worked his way up the run of the latter at the Standard Oil Company for most of all he never built himself a mansion. He never owned a house until he retired from standard oil. He was a rented house in brooklyn with rented furniture but they very modest life and kept secret his passion for collecting. Host secretive build a bigger house if he didnt spend some money so much money on the manuscripts. Tell us about that. Guest undoubtedly that is true but he displayed some of his artwork at home but most of the already collective for books, manuscripts musical scores costumes playbills and on and on, anything related to shakespeare he looked at, he studied and when the house was full to the bram he would take them down into the basement wrap them up with them in a box and ship the box off to a warehouse. I looked at receipts for storage fees for 30 years for some of the rooms that he rented so one by one he would select these warehouses rooms with his treasures come, make an amatory and make a note of which box within which room and over 30 years accumulated bram after room in his house in brooklyn manhattan. Host i think theres a tv shows called porter semis theres a little element of that i suppose. Guest theres a big element of that. If you are a person who is obsessed with colette in recyclable bottles are contemporary newspapers and magazines and is back from an your house to where you cant walk for your house we might say you have some kind of borderline personality or it interferes with your normal living. Henry folger certainly acquired things. The only things the only things he acquired were very valuable and interesting so we dont call them a quarter. Host not boxes of Kentucky Fried Chicken from 10 years ago. You want to talk a little bit about James Swanson of wellknown author and a bit of a collector of other memorabilia . Guest bit of a collector is an understatement. You are being kind yes. Part of my research on henry folger was informed by the fact that i did live with the collector and he had been collecting objects manuscripts looks related to lincoln since he was 10 years old. He has amassed an enormous collection that i havent 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. We have Storage Facilities in more than one state. Host i was going to say that you know about. Guest that i know about, right cool. Host james is a coauthor of a number but particularly manhunt about John Wilkes Booth after the lincoln assassination but lets go back in time a little further than that. The first folio. Could you talk about what a folio is . Some of the viewers may not be a aware of it in the first folio shakespeares work and the two men, this saviors of shakespeares plays. Guest the folio verse 5 refers to the size of the book. Its very large, 13 times eight eight third train x8 depending. That would be closer to something called the cordell which is half the size and what made it interesting was the folio side conveyed some kind of gravitas in it and prior to this first folio shakespeare that size it really been reserved for political and religious tracks with some 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 friends John Henry Hemings and john condell put together as a tribute to their deceased friend. Host how long before had he passed away . Guest he died in 1660 and the first folio was published in 1623. The idea probably percolated about five years after shakespeares death. At which time by the time of shakespeares death only half of his place at and published so they remained half of the is it not arguably known to history had these two men not said but these all together in one volume and save them for posterity. Many of the manuscripts possibly been the only copies of the manuscript had gone up in flames at the globe theater in 1613. Host what a horrific story that is. Talk a little bit about how that fair fire came about. Interesting and a bit of a reminiscence of some but tragedies we have had in america. Guest the globe theater was like the other theaters in london trying to attract patrons patrons. They held 1500 people, an enormous structure and one of the ways they attracted patrons was the added special effects and one of the special effects and we have a good idea of lets use a real canon. Host not that computergenerated canon, the rep cannon. Guest they shot off a canon upon the arrival of a think it was henry the eighth or bribed during a play. They announced is ripe with the canon shot and some of the wadding that was in the canon shot up to the thatched roof of the theater and it caught fire and earned to the ground in two hours. The great fire of mostly what they did was in fact exclusively what they did was they held them very closely. There was a single copy under lock and key at the theater and someone was in charge of those manuscripts because they fear that other Theater Companies would get copies of them and take them out to other cities perform the place and not pay the many royalties. So they figured we have got the rights to hamlet you want to have the only copy thats fair. We dont want other Companies Performing hamlet. Host i know from the movie shakespeare in love which presumably contains some historical accuracy, huge amount of rivalry between the theatrical companies write to the level of better and perhaps i was exaggerated in the film but we know it was although popular entertainment extremely revelers. Guest there was a lot of Competition Among the Theater Companies. By the end of shakespeares career he retires back to Stratford Upon Avon in 1611. By that time there are two major Theater Companies left in funded in part of the reason for that relates back to the puritan prohibiting the production of the place. They didnt let her lay shut the theaters down but thats also demonstrated in shakespeare in love the rebel shuts the theater down either for plays or later the puritan would say that place where 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 great line that woman is a woman. I was also fascinated as a former business journalist and i covered the graphic arts Printing Industry to learn about jaggard the blind printer. Fascinating how the first folio was actually constructed. It was massive for one thing 900 pages. Paper was a problem. Talk a little bit about that. Guest the end of the story is without many copies of the first folio to compare it would be very difficult to draw the inference about how the book was actually printed so having many Copies Available to compare sidebyside health them figure out how to copy. 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. He didnt print page one and then page two and page three. He printed them in little look with cindy started in the middle of the book that and you set the type moving from the inside out. Its very hard to understand but i will explain it in the book. This meant two things. One was that you as a printer had to estimate how much tax would fit on the page but youd able to fit this little booklet exactly. If you have too much room not such a big problem, you could add printers ornament, something decorative. You could virtually doublespaced the text with. If you ran out of space on the other hand it might have to print as prose or you may have to cut a line from the speech in order to make the text within. Host the typesetter says this is the last chapter has to go. Guest today if he were on using microsoft word you would hit justify and everything would fit to the space but you couldnt do that pretty at the hands of the tie. Host one thing im curious about today we have mostly hardcover and paperback books and ebooks and during his long as there is mbytes but the paper in many of todays books and not speaking of highquality literary or art novels but popular fiction doesnt last very long. Talk about the paper and we will talk more about the presentday collection of the folios but talk about if you would what is this paper made of . Is an danger or will it be in danger in five years or 10 years . Guest the answer is com. Gov. Yeah. The first paper was highquality for rag paper from normandy france. Thats where the best paper came from and that is what jaggard used in printing the first folio. Part of that was to convey that the boards of the volume to say this isnt something important something special. Something like a paperback book which would be half the size of the folio would have been printed on lowerquality paper. It would have been more brutal and more civic and less likely to integrate which is why the cordoz size plates are much more rare. And the folios have survived with pretty good, and pretty good numbers. They suffered hazards of time fire insects, infestation. People tearing plays out because its more convenient to be able to carry one play around. Host rather than 900 pages. Guest a pretty good number of them have survived. Host one thing i found as dating jacquard wasnt doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He had to estimate to print axe number y number and y number india to sell them. Of the 750 copies how did they get into the stream of commerce . Guest they were sold out of the printer shop. Host is so printer bookseller in a way. Guest the printing, the bookselling the paper warehouses would have been around in london so the square around the same pulp was printing to what broadway is in theaters. That was in part geographic accident but impart planned by the crown because the crown want to know what was being rented 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 of the time . Guest at the time of publication that would have cost of found bush is a pretty hefty sum of money. A cordoz size by contrast may have cost five or 6p so much cheaper. Host the first copy of the press of the millionaire and the bard is probably the same as the 10,000 not the press. There were some differences and variations. Was that because of the length differences or the actual construction of the book itself . Guest there are two main reasons. One is corrections to the test were made while the printing was going on so you might printing and on page 64 for copy number 60 ford the printer comes over and makes corrections to it has the type reset to break the corrections, misspellings for example. We have to correct that on the fly and the proof sheet would be back with the other pages and later collated into the copy and the new pages or printed off what have the corrected version. For every page there was a single proof sheet uncorrected pages and some corrected version so if you multiply that by 900 pages every copy is slightly different for you. Host have jaggard taken over at this point or were hemings and condell involve . Guest they would have taken the courses available to them they already printed versions of the play that have been available in quarto. They edited them. They had acted in these plays with shakespeare. They had been friends with him for a long time so they knew how the plays acted so they could look at the example one of the quartos of hamlet and how is published in say thats not how it was, this is how it was and then added into the one that we must usually now. This all would have been in how they had edited essentially these plays. Once the manuscripts were transcribed by probably ralph crane, they got to the printer shop and that is probably not so much isaac who was blind by this time but his son who would have done the corrections. Host now what im thinking of is shakespeare to my surprise did not really become popular until sometime after his death. He was wellknown shakeup the end playwright but it was hunted in 40 years until his popularity began to soar. What happened to the first folios . Were they marginalized or did people truly realize that someday this would be valuable . Guest i dont know the collectors or actors or producers at the time. Someday people will recognize how great this is. In fact over that period of time we have the english civil wars during which the puritans took over parliament and then they prohibited place from being produced which meant there were no new plays being written into all plays were not being performed so it was not until the restoration that shakespeares plays again come back to the stage and by then public tastes had changed a little bit. The producers of the plays started to change the endings. Host i have had several movies made in hollywood. I know how that works. Guest its notorious at the end. A particular actor on the copy of the folio a man named david derek derek. He added that the plays themselves producing them in london for example romeo and juliette he produced with either happy endings are said endings you can imagine. A few of the plays he cut an act or to. Host a whole act . Guest a whole act. It back one time he cut to ask. And so by the time we get to the 150 years after shakespeares death to plays are quite different from he remembered. Really by going back to the first folio that we have a good idea of how they would have been performed at the time that shakespeare was still alive he had. Host this brings up a very important point primarily the first folio but there were other folios as well. I found fascinating and i think it was the third folio all of a sudden you see a copy of the third folio open it up, seven new plays one of which was apparently attributable to shakespeare. Where the others come from a talk about the other folios. Guest they were for folios altogether, for editions. Each of them got further and further away from the original text as hemings and condell had edited it so again they would affect a nice place. There are hundreds of mistakes that are too distant to later folios and essentially the first folio sells out in nine years. The second folio is produced the third and fourth ad possible place to which you refer. I could dig into my attic and say today i found a manuscript of harper lees fourth or fifth novel and 20 years posthumously i publish her work. Thats what was going on. They thought they could make a little extra money by saying the portfolio is better than the first. Host they must have had some Intrinsic Value someone would want to have maybe the whole panoply of folios if possible. Guest yeah and collectors want huntington and folger to own the complete batch. Most of those collectors one of the high spot, good quality copy of one of each. Folger wanted every copy he could get his hands on. Good copy, bad copy with graffiti and it, missing plays with pages with anzac ward holds and insect board holes. He wanted them all. Host i have to bring up a subject that im not going to charge your world sees for this however should you know that let the viewers know my last name is deeper and according to my family genealogist i am descended from Oxford Edwards Deaver who was and is called the antistride 40 hands. Is that the correct way to pronounce it . The conspiracy theorists who believe he is a front man. I do not prescribe to that so i wont issue world taste for the whole shakespeare story but talk a little bit about that. Guest broadly its called the option and shakespeare writes this place and this group of people who have various candidates for whom they believe actually wrote the plays that are to be due to shakespeare. There are few things are important to know. One is that in this lifetime no one doubted that shakespeare had written them. It was 150 years before someone says i dont think this man mannerly wrote