Reviews for The Book of William:

Want to hear Paul Collins on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday in the Folger Shakespeare Library vault with Scott Simon?

“Paul Collins gives bookishness a good name. Collins gets no greater kick than to root around in the musty scent of old books, and then write his own about the experience. The author proves himself to be an amusing, if unlikely, guide… He offers a comprehensive early publishing history of Shakespeare’s plays before setting off on a present-day quest to track down some of the most coveted Folios.”—Boston Globe. Read full review.

“[A] lively and entertaining history of one of the most important books in English literature.”—The New York Times Book Review

“If you’re looking for an engrossing read this summer, what you really want is a history of the first collection of the plays of William Shakespeare. Highly engaging…If you previously imagined that the words “page-turner” and “Shakespeare” did not belong in the same sentence, this could be the book that changes your mind.”—Christian Science Monitor. Read full review.

“The Book of William is filled with geeky delights. Collins pours all of the mountainous curiosity and good-hearted wit he showed in his last book, The Trouble with Tom, into The Book of William. Not only is he a first-rate storyteller, he has a keen eye for useful marginalia, such as when he takes the time to examine the psychology of stuttering, as it applies to Shakespeare’s friend and executor, John Hemings. It would be easy to say that this is a book for bibliophiles, or theater lovers, and it is. But as far as what some of us want out of our summer reading—to get lost, to learn something, to laugh—we’d make the case for this as the perfect beach read.”—Time Out Chicago. Read full review.

“An entertaining consideration arranged in five acts of the serendipitous social life the [first folio] has experienced over the four centuries of its existence. A nice touch are the little vignettes Collins offers of key principals…So are the mini-travelogues he includes of the places he visits in the United States, England and Japan, where 12 folios reside in a single vault at Meisei University. Writing in a style that is light and casual, Collins makes productive use of a vast body of Shakespeare scholarship that he references in an engaging essay at the end of the book, called ‘Further Readings.’”—Los Angeles Times.. Read full review.

“Collins' journey is that of a man stirred by ancient callings: Here is a tireless time traveler and researcher, focusing our attention on the beauty inherent in obscure and sacred objects.”—San Francisco Chronicle. Read full review.

The Book of William on Los Angeles Times Summer Reading List.

“Collins is pleasant company on these journeys through musty and scholarly byways; fans of Bill Bryson might find the style similar. This is great, informative fun.”—Portland Oregonian. Read full review.

Here's a terrific feature on Paul and The Book of William in the Portland Tribune .

Some radio information...:

Paul Collins taped a 15 minute interview with San Francisco’s KFOG-FM on Friday, July 10th. Paul also do a live hour on Jefferson Public Radio in Ashland, Oregon on Friday, July 24th.

Great review from the blog PhiloBiblos.

“Gleefully astonishing… Collins provides one of the most enjoyable examples of a most enjoyable genre, the book biography, as he tells the stories of individual Shakespeare first folios, their owners, their uses, and their travels. It’s a supremely enlightening journey that Collins’ convivial manner makes thoroughly gratifying.”—Booklist. Read feature.

“[A] delightful literary ramble… The Book of William is, however, more than a compelling history. Collins is an impassioned bibliophile, and the Folio is Everybook: "The story of each Folio, of each survivor across four centuries from that Barbicon print shop, is the story of the vicissitudes of every book after it leaves the author's hands: They are scorned and loved, remade and destroyed, and eternally lost and found again."—Minneapolis Star Tribune. Read full review.

"Bibliophile Paul Collins narrates the history of Shakespeare’s First Folio, among the world’s most obsessively pursued books, across the centuries."—Christian Science Monitor’s Summer Reading List. Read Summer List

Barnes & Noble review gave a favorable review of The Book of William on its website. Read review.

Undoubtedly, the Bard himself would be amused to learn all about the fate of the book compiled after his death by fellow actors and colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell. It was, a collector said recently, “the most important secular work of all time.” Collins (Sixpence House), an English professor and NPR regular, is passionate, knowledgeable and sassy in bringing this story to glorious life. Collins divides his work into five acts, leading his reader on a whirlwind trip through the Four Folios eventually printed, into feuds between Alexander Pope and Lewis Theobald and to the opportunistic reach of a financially desperate Dr. Johnson. Over the next 200 years, there are the stories of Henry Clay Folger as well as an ingenious collating machine and related technologies for today’s textual scholars. Collins’s remarkable voyage through time and across the globe leads to Japan, where the most obsessive collectors of “Sheikusupia” reside. This is for anyone with an interest in how Shakespeare has come down to us, the nature of the book business, the art of editing and the evolution of copyright law. A 20-page “Further Readings” section is by itself a sheer delight. (July)—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Collins (Banvard's Folly; Not Even Wrong) has done it again. This history—spanning the globe and 400 years in the life and fortunes of one of the most famous books in the English language—is not the dry province of historians, bibliophiles, and antiquarians. Collins relates the series of near-disasters of the folios' inception (lack of intact manuscripts left by the Bard; Heminge and Condell's blind printer) and continued existence (folios stolen, burned, lost at sea, left to molder in ruined estates, ripped apart and used to wrap fish), which gives readers a renewed appreciation for the rarity and value of the folio. VERDICT There are other authoritative works on Shakespeare's folios, including W.W. Greg's The Shakespeare First Folio and Edwin Eliott Willoughby's The Printing of the First Folio of Shakespeare, but Collins's is a welcome addition to this group. Witty, detailed, and highly entertaining, it will be appreciated by fans of Shakespeare, history, or human folly,."—Felicity D. Walsh, Library Journal

The Book of William makes Scott Eyman’s top 5 summer books list in the Palm Beach Post.

"The intricate, improbable story of how the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays (1623) became the holiest—i.e., most expensive—of grails in Biblioland. Collins (English/Portland State Univ.) comes well equipped for his peripatetic task. Having written about bibliomania (Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, 2003) and an iconic historical figure (The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine, 2005), the author also possesses a lively curiosity and, to the enlightenment of readers of this galloping, globetrotting romp, an impressive travel allowance. As the Folio publishers divided the Bard’s plays into five acts, so too does Collins arrange his tale. Act One opens in a contemporary London auction room—a Folio sold for £2.5 million—but Collins soon returns to the 1620s to watch the surviving Globe colleagues of the recently deceased Shakespeare arrange with printer William Jaggard to print the 36 plays they have assembled—18 of which, Collins reminds us, didn’t exist anywhere else. No Folio would mean no Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest or other gems. Collins then follows these First Folios through the centuries, pausing occasionally to educate us about the manufacture of paper, the difference between a folio and a quarto and the reputation of playwrights in general, Shakespeare in particular. Only obliquely does Collins address the “authorship question,” noting slyly that a Japanese scholar was the first to notice that all the flowers mentioned in the plays grow in the vicinity of Stratford-upon-Avon. The author also looks at the editions of the Bard’s plays that appeared after 1623—there were subsequent folios and editions by Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson—and sheds some light on Bard-saving heroes unknown to lay readers—notably Lewis Theobald, who was so alarmed at the errors in Pope’s edition that he prepared his own. To see the best copies of the Folios, Collins interviewed experts and traveled from the vault of the Folger Shakespeare Library to a Japanese academic library. Exemplary scholar-adventurer writing."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review