Mays' tone is admiring throughout, though she does step back occasionally to hint that today, Folger might well be diagnosed as a hoarder. But her emphasis is on the keen analytical mind that served him as both collector and businessman, the parsimonious nature that saw him through lean years — and almost cost him his greatest treasure — and the self-effacing instincts that let him scoop up rare books by the boxful when a collector with more ego might have made market prices spike.
A collector with more ego, frankly, might have made a sexier subject. Folger the man comes off as a touch dull, a guy with a so-so golf game and a day job involving memos and ledgers. Mays turns for excitement not to any behind-the-scenes business dramas or purple-tinged personal crises but to a handful of battles for especially rare volumes — one, very publicly, a crushing defeat for Folger. It's greatly to her credit that these episodes, which are essentially recaps of discreet negotiations among gentlemen of leisure, read at their liveliest like taut spy-vs.-spy maneuvers from some Cold War novel.
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A Fortune In Folios: One Man's Hunt For Shakespeare's First Editions
And Mays pays respectful tribute to Henry Folger's wife, Emily Jordan Folger, daughter of a Lincoln administration official, president of her Vassar class, herself a trained Shakespearean and a collector of formidable instincts. "Emily has never received proper credit for her role," Mays writes, "perhaps because Henry wrote the checks and handled the correspondence, but their acquisitions were the result of their collective judgment."
One-third of the 233 surviving First Folios — an astounding 82 of them, compared to the five held by the British Library — form the nucleus of Henry and Emily Folger's legacy, which stands there still on Capitol Hill: the Folger Shakespeare Library, a sleek white-marble Washington monument, not to justice or liberty or anything particularly American, but to the vast riches of the Anglophone heritage that binds these United States to their mother country, and through it to so many nations more. That, as Mays rightly notes, is a heritage shaped by Shakespeare more profoundly than by anyone else.