Weekends Television Schedule visit us online at booktv. Org. Stephen grant talks about henry and emily folger, a collection of shakespeare books and manuscripts they started collecting in 1885 and creation of the Folger Shakespeare library. This was toasted by politics and prose bookstore in washington d. C. Is just under an hour. Thank you, justin, and thank you, politics and prose. Authors are so lucky politics and prose is here for them. Biographers seek to capture a life. In this case it was two lives. I rode the dual biography of henry and emily hamlet. A couple from brooklyn. Henry and Emily Norton Folger were born in the 1850s when Many American families have only two books in their library. The bible and shakespeare. They died childless in the 1930s. I searched in vain for someone who remembered them. The closest i got was an octogenarian who had attended the dedication of the Folger Library in 1932 on shakespeares birthday in presence of president and mrs. Herbert hoover. Id beseeched her, what do you remember . She confided in me my leggings pitched. What did the folgers leave behind for a biographer . First, a handsome, white, marble edifice of neoclassical design two blocks from the capital that contains a world Class Private research library, a theater where shakespeare and other plays by Award Winning directors are performed. There is a renaissance Concert Series called the folger consort. There are curated exhibits, robust programs and poetry, and in education, communications and out reach and a cohort of dedicated who will show you the public spaces. In the reading rooms english professors and shakespeare scholars are consulting rare and even irreplaceable Literary Works from 1476, which marks the introduction of printing in england to 1714, the death of queen anne. The couple responsible for this collection, the folgers collected 92,000 books. It was an average of six books today that arrives at his business address which was 26 broadway. There are 82 copies of shakespeares first folio. The 1623 compilation of 46 shakespeare plays, 18 of which would have been lost because they had not been printed. Each one of these 82 copies is different in some way. The folgers collected 234 paintings, most of them related to shakespeare. They collected furniture, tapestries, a quarter of a million playbills. This edifice, i want you to remember, is a library, a theater, a museum, and a mausoleum because there is a bronze plaque in the reading room behind which are two turns and their ashes. What else to the folgers leave behind that might give a biographer some notion of what made them take . They left behind no daily diary, no love letters. I did find two building scrapbooks which chronicled their college years. Henry went to m. Hurst. Emily did not. They both graduated in 1879. Going to college for henry and emily was a big deal. None of their parents had been to college. State each graduated phi beta kappa. Emily was president upperclass for life. Henry graduated henry graduated fifth in his class. They went on to get masters degrees. Henrys masters degree was in colombia in law school. Emily got a masters degree in shakespeare studies. In a year when there were only 250 women in the country that obtained that advanced degree. They both received honorary doctorates from amherst college, an honorary doctorates in letters. One of the things that i came upon early in my research was a collection of theater tickets stubbs luckily they didnt throw very much away. 125 shakespeare plays they went to, i looked at the stubs, i know where they sat. Much more useful than the ticket stubs and was emilys play diary. She wrote a peach of the performances, not only the name of the play, name of the central actors, the date and location, she would write about whether in her opinion the actors caught the spirit of the play. She would give pronouncements about facial mobility that she observed, was there an actor who lists. She would listen to people sitting behind her, in front of kirk, to her sides and includes those comments in her play diary. This is an unexploited mind for someone interested in looking at performance of shakespeare plays from the 1890s through 1930s. Then i came across four archival boxes of a very forbidding nature. You probably have some archival boxes, stiff cardboard, about this size. Opened it up and each of these four archival boxes was full of checks. Canceled checks. A buyout effort today would have very bad luck looking around for four archive boxes of canceled objects. However, once i had gotten over the panic of figuring out that for the next three weeks i would be looking only at checks because there were 10,000 of them, i came to the realization that a check book is an autobiography. It shows where your values and interests lie. I brought a tape measure into the folger vault. You dont usually get to see it. I wanted to find out what i had gotten myself into because i knew about the checks, but what else was in what is referred to as the collecting shakespeare the story of henry and emily folger quote collection . These are personal papers all i am not talking about 92,000 books. I came up with 434 linear feet, more than a football field of materials that i should go through with my natural tendency to leave no stone unturned. Of this amount of archives, 250 linear feet were book auction catalogs. That is two thirds of a football field. For someone buying that aquarium books, there is no more important tools and a book auction catalog. Folger save all his mailing labels, so i know where they came from. Mainly london. Where folger dealt with 150 booksellers but also from new york. The person who went through all of these forgotten catalogs was not henry. They are arrived at 26 broadway where he worked. He brought from home and it was emily who went through all of those catalogs. She had a pencil with her. When she saw an item that she thought be long in their collection, she would right away the line in the margin next to the item. If she wasnt sure, she would put a question mark or two. She would turn the corner down so that when henry came back after his day job he could go through the catalogs and go right to the pages where there was an item as though she were saying henry, we need this for our collection, dont we . Henrys job began where emilys ended. He was sent the first part of the night figuring out how much he would bid on the items emily had preselected. Emily also kept the card catalog, and not a simple matter because she went into a lot of detail about the quality of the description of quality of each, with his they were facsimile, title pages, it got very detailed. So when you are doing research you go where the story takes you. When henry came home from his day job, let me tell you about his day job. One week after henry graduated from college he started working for john d. Rockefeller at the standard oil co. He started as a statistical clerk. He was one of the few College Graduates in standard oil. He resigned after 49 years in the firm. His last two positions were president and chairman of the board of standard oil co. Of new york. He was also a director of standard oil co. Of new jersey. Became mobile, standard oil co. Of new jersey became exxon. So you have an idea of how well he did since he heavily followed rockefellers advice to invest heavily in the firm. I was saying you go where the story leads you. One of the archives i had to visit was the rockefeller archive in sleepy hollow, new york. Another one i had to visit was the standard oil archives at the university of texas. So i had made a conscious decision that i would not only write about how and the twelfth spend his money but how he earned it. I thought that would make sense and it would be interesting and fill in the gatt for some readers. Those who are particularly interested in the business side, in the petroleum side of the folger story, let me recommend chapters 3 and 4. So my challenge was to understand and to convey, how did folger do it . How did he rise to the top of two fields, the Petroleum Industry in the world, and rare books, especially shakespeares period. The folgers had no children, they had no private yachts to distract them. They had no string of resources. They accepted no business lunches. They had no business receptions in their homes. They limited their family reunions to twice a year. They were singleminded be devoted to i you familiar with the phrase by idolatry a bardolat bardolatry . The folders were guilty as charged. Annettesaid unabashed bard o bardologis bardologists. Although they believe firmly that were shakespeare wrote shakespeare. They developed a very important collection of books on the authorship controversy and they love to collect forgeries of shakespeare. Chapter 6 might interest some people from the west coast or people interested in rivalry because folger was not alone in trying to get his hands on certain books. One of his main competitors was Henry Huntington. On the west coast in san marino, calif. You have the huntington library, museum and gardens. Henry huntingtons pockets were much deeper than folgers. For instance, he bought 200 entire libraries where as folger but just a few entire libraries. But they had different objectives in their collecting. Like jpmorgan, huntington loved bindings. Folger had no interest in decorative bindings mainly from the nineteenth century. Morgan and huntington liked pristine books. Folger was unimpressed with a pristine book. What he loved was marginalia, writing in the margins which showed how readers reacted to the content. If you take the first folio, the 82 copies in the folger, you have a number of people who were inspired by shakespeare and they rode their own poems in the margins of the first folio. If they were an artist, they drew on the margins of the first folio. If they thought they knew the queens english decor record shakespeare in the first folio. A last difference between huntington and folger is what they would do with their duplicates. And to have a lot more having bought 200 entire libraries. Huntingtons sold his duplicates. He had book auction catalogs made of his duplicates and i read those and who bought some of the duplicates . Folger. Seagate ball is duplicates away. Get a lot to about relatives but he didnt sell from. He traded among some occasions. Three biographies have been written about Henry Huntington and not one yet about folger so i thought i had better do something about that. I found that research and writing are lonely pursuits. Fortunately in washington d. C. There is a support group. It is called the Washington Biography Group. We meet once a month in the Washington International school. Mark hackter has been the leader of this group for more than a quarter century. He worked decades at the smithsonian and one of his last jobs was director of the portrait gallery. Mark begins every meeting with this mantra. He says we are not a book club that reads and discusses books. All of us love to read biography. Many of us are writing biographies. A few of us are in peril of becoming the subject of a biography. As i look around this group, i see members of the Washington Biography Group and that is part of what we do. We support each other during our meetings, everyone speaks, we go around the table, we address the scene for the second part of our monthly meeting. I would also think as i look around this group today that there might be some budding biographers here. Could i ask the members of the Washington Biography Group to raise their hands so we could see who they are . 1, 2, 3, 4. All right. So i am not going to ask the budding biographers to raise their hands but i will suggest that you know who they are and you might want to look some up afterwards and get together because the Washington Biography Group is always looking for new members. Remembers come to every meeting. There is one item that i would like to draw your attention to and that is the authors photo in the book collecting shakespeare. A publisher often asks an author for a photo. And often an author sense in a professional head shot. I didnt do that. I suggested and the Editorial Committee accepted a wall shot and i will explain what i mean by that. This is the authors photo that you cant all see that it is on the table. It is the photograph was taken in the east side of the reading room in the Folger Library. The photographer was robert altman, architectural photographer. This was his last photograph. He died at age 85. I am very small in this picture. I have gone either side of me henry and emily folger clad in their academic gowns. Emily has her king could, henry is purple and hearst could. Above me is the best of william shakespeare, quill in hand. It is a model of the bust that is in the Holy Trinity Church in strafford in avon above the barreds bones. So even though the author is very small he is in very big company in this authors photocell i have written a love story. Henry and emily love each other, they both loved shakespeare. I find this the greatest man known as the plot in angloamerican literary history. The last thought that i will share with you before we go to questions and comments, i will call from a letter that henry folger wrote the library of congress in january of 1930, six months before he died. He wrote to Herbert Putnam these words. This is an excerpt from a longer letter. He said i have been wondering a great deal whether i will ever be able to get a volume published in my honor. Now i can say that henry, you waited 84 years but now you have one. Thank you. [applause] i can take questions. I told you this question was coming before the event. On page 11 of the prologue you say being a collector can take ones life, take over ones wife. I know because i am one. My question is what do you collect . Fair question. The folger for it smitten by the collecting bug. My collection has been of vintage picture postcards which i collected mainly in parisian postcard boutiques. But before i became a biographer ive produced three books on the picture postcards of three countries where i served when i was a Foreign Service officer so the answer to that is picture postcards. I am not a member of the grolier club. I dont go to book collecting of fares, but it helped me in writing about a collector to be one. Thank you. I read the book, very well done, congratulations. You mention henry folger have a list of retirement projects he never got to, the last one of which was up memoir of book collecting. Any good collecting store you left out of the book that you could share tonight . Good question. What is not in the book . It is a little bit difficult for me to sort what is in there and what is not in there. I would say about folger that he applied secrecy to all of his actions in obtaining real estate and purchasing the books that he was after. For instance he wouldnt sign any of his cables folger. He signed them golfer. I havent even talked about the fact that henry folger was a regular golf partner of his boss, john d. Rockefeller. There are a lot of other stories in there. Unfortunately as a collector, henry had a hard time stopping to collect to sit down and write the stories. He wrote very well in his freshman year at amherst, he wrote letters to his parents comment and that is where i got an idea how well he could write. He wrote about a 1619 book which was the pirated compilation of nine quartos of shakespeare. He called it the most precious book in the world. Resubmitted that article to four american magazines that rejected it, finally was published by the new outlook. We can only imagine what he might have written down had he had more time, but luckily he left the some of those stories. Was their only home in brooklyn . The second question, did that have crossed the paths of the rosenbaums. The folgers were married in elizabeth, new jersey and their early years they lived with emilys parents in elizabeth, new jersey and there were already standard Oil Refineries in that area. Some of the know, having driven through there. They moved to brooklyn in the 1880s and in 1895 they relocated to a larger house. It was in the bedford area of brooklyn. What was your second question . Rosen balk is a figure who appears in chapter 6 because he was the main provider of books for huntington and folger. He was a master bookseller and dancer, dancing back and forth between these two book collectors keeping them both happy and he might say for instance, mr. Folger, are you interested in this Third Quarter of . I will be going to california next week, so there is a marvelous biography of rosenbalk by fleming which is available in the museum in philadelphia which i recommend to all of you. Simple question, in your research did you come up with an answer to the question why washington . This in the 1910s, 20s, 30s, there was no great university, only later did attend that kind of prominence. Henry didnt write out exactly why, but let me give you a couple of elements of an answer. I came across a list of ten locations. It was in alphabetical order and it could only have related to where folger was considering putting the library. One of them was Stratford On Avon and he does admit the most pressure on him which you can understand. Another one was amherst college. He had not only gone to amherst but in his will asked and hearst to be the administrator of the Folger Library. He didnt want it to be a government entity. So was nantucket on the list. Lets get on the ferry and visit the shakespeare library. The folders have been living on nantucket. That is where they settled in the 1660s. I admit folger was fifth in his class in amherst. Franklin was the person who said to folger, if you want to put your library in the best place, this was 1919 when they met. I suggest you put it in washington d. C. I wouldnt have said this 40 years ago but there is no reason why washington d. C. Could not and should not be a Cultural Capital as well as being a political capital. At this time, you had relatively few cultural buildings, you had the library of congress. And folger did write, i decided to build in washington because i am a patriot. I will take advantage of an open mike. I read your book and enjoyed it much. I concentrated on for second reading in chapters 3 and 4, that led me to try to figure out how Henry Clay Folger ended up with 45 of the Magnolia Petroleum co. You say later in the book, it was the money that he made from this investment that may be in quotation marks because there are a couple indictments involved, both federal and state but it was the proceeds from Magnolia Petroleum co. That basically enabled the folgers to build the Folger Library. That is correct. The standard oil co. 26 broadway in manhattan was known as the tower of secrecy. Very difficult to find out what was going on and if someone went up to john d. Rockefeller and asked a question, going back over time, we dont have any archives, we cant help you with that. It wasnt easy to try to piece together the role of the magnolia gas and oil companies. I did not find very much visiting the standard oil archives in austin, texas, but the library of congress has a lot of books and that is certainly a source. Henry often remained under the radar in terms of being the face of standard oil. He was a very nature shy, reserved person, he only gave one interview in his life. Whereas rockefeller board the brunt of representing the company and being the object of scrutiny by journalists, folger was indicted in texas with other highranking executives at standard oil. But they were not convicted. They did not serve any time. So the best i try to do in chapter 3 was to bring out the importance of that one oil company which here to fore had generally not been associated with folger or with the fact that that allowed him and another senior executive, john archibald, to have the resources which allowed them to buy their folios. I dont get many questions about the business side of it so i am pleased to have that one. I have to get to the mic. Steve, for those who have not read your book there is a delightful story that you include and maybe you would repeat for those who have not heard it, of the remark that john d. Rockefeller made about hinting that his disapproval about wasting money on the collection of such antiquities. Right. I mentioned that folger and rockefeller played golf together. They had a date mondays at 10 00, and the story is that leaving the green one day, rockefeller said henry, i read in the papers that you paid 100,000 for of book and then he paused and henri gault. Because he hated to have any one of his book sellers divulge what he paid for a book in the press. What he answered was oh john, you know how the press exaggerates. You pay 10 for something and you read in the press keep a 100 for it. Then he paused. And john responded i am glad to hear you say that, henry, because my brother and i and other Board Members would not want to think the president of one of our companies was foolish enough to pay 100,000 for a book. Is that all from advancement for science and whenever . Repeat the question please. Who grades the guys, the ones who collect books . Who rates . Who rates or grade them . Who rates or grades . Any conflict between the collectors, that sort of thing, regulation . Tell me a little more about your question. You are talking about books that folger bought . How do they great in terms of quality. In terms of quality. If i understand your question, how do they grade or rate the books, the book collectors like folger want to buy. So you might have been henry folger and Henry Huntington who are both after a quarto or folio and they would buy the catalog and they would read it and option catalogs in 1900 were much more, in general, much more detailed than they are now. You might find little squibb but there are more details in terms of the condition of what you are buying. Folger would read those descriptions extremely carefully and if he did on a book and it came, he would compare the book with the description and he often wrote back and said you said there were only three facsimile pages. I found six so either i want you to take 25 off the price arrival send it back so he had a lot more back and forth when the book came. He always paid cash and insisted on 10 because of paying cash and insisted on inspections so he might look at a book, send it back. If he collected 92,000 books we dont know how many he sent back. I was wondering if you could tell us where emily and henrys passion came from. We know from the rockefeller store that he wasnt necessarily surrounded by bibliophiles. They had this passions a share. I wonder if you could tell us if you found any artifacts that proved their love of shakespeare. For both henry and emily. Lets take henry furst. The first book of shakespeare that henry owned was the complete works, 1875. A present from his younger brother. I still find that amazing. 1875, henry folger was a freshman at amherst. A younger brother might have been 15. A younger brother buying a complete set of shakespeare and giving it to an older brother, how prophetic, what a mature gift from a high schooler. Emily did become a shakespeare scholar. Both of them read a lot of shakespeare, lot of English Literature and when they match it was three years after they graduated and they match in the home of Charles Pratt and you will come across the name of pratt in the book probably 70 times because Charles Pratt was henry folgers roommate for five years at amherst. This father founded pratt institute, still going today. And i notice some and hearst alums in the house to know about pratt field, pratt jim, what else . Pratt dormitory. The pratt home in 1882 is the location of a lot of literary felons. That is where henry and emily are thought to have matched and soon they were attending these themselves and both became an officer and both recited shakespeare. They are cut from the same cloth and when you go through emilys scrabbled in the folger fault, that is not far from west point and she had a few dates with west point people but it didnt stick. I was wondering if there was any particular book or document that the folgers considered the most valuable part of their collection. Outside of the folios, the book that i referred to that was called the most precious book, not just 1619, but the quarter. The size was about that size, the folio was twice what a court go is. The book that henry folger is holding in his hand in the oil portrait in the reading room of the folger. Rosenbock bought the unique copy from marsden perry, who was a book collector from providence and as soon as he got it, he went to standard oil co. And asked to be admitted to the thirteenth floor of the executive suite and wanted to see mr. Folger and he was told he was in an executive Committee Meeting and rosenbox scribbled something, please hand this to mr. Folger. A few minutes later henry folger came out, took the call and said you bought the marsden perry, action, will you sell me the quarto . And this guy didnt see i would just on the way to san marino, calif. It was purported to could you come to the microphone please . A quick followup. Did they examine the prices they paid for the collection . Some of the prices were for individual books and others were for groups of books and sometimes you could tell and sometimes you didnt. Lets take the first folio, you bought 82 of them. They were 300, the most he paid was 53,000. I use a formula to tell the reader how much in todays dollars. Sometimes folger himself got mixed up in what he had paid. Some was in dollars and some in pounds. The entity, they are going back and folger was known as a mathematical genius. That is why he was so valuable that standard oil. And Oil Refineries all over the refinery. He inherited a lot of mathematical skills, he often rarely admitted i really have lost track. I was just thinking what a massive enterprise this seems to be, to work with them and support them. If you compare huntington and folger, huntington had a huge staff. Emily worked fulltime on this. You had the couple in 1910, personal assistant to folger paid for by standard oil, started doing secretarial work in the books. I would not be surprised if he spent more time on books rather than petroleum and i was hoping to get a hold of his diary or notes or something. He was a man of integrity who would go to the bank can do a lot of errants but i can say that the whole collection we are talking about going through the book auction catalogs, the card catalog, even when the folgers went on vacations they would take a modified card catalog so they could keep up and went to virginia, the homestead in hot springs where emily would take the waters and henry would play golf, yet they would still send cables to their book sellers. Thank you. [applause] before the final line up to the left. Plenty of copies by the register. [inaudible conversations] are you blogging
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