Obsession as Mythmaking: Six Books About Books

I am writing about six books that are not about books in general, or book collecting, or the act of reading. Four of these are stories of specific books or sets of books (i.e., the Oxford English Dictionary); each story is told from several standpoints: historical, technological, literary and cultural. The books at the heart of these stories are more than books; they are characters in real-life dramas. Paul Collins, writing about William Shakespeare's First Folio, calls it "the most important secular work of all time." What could be more dramatic than that, except maybe the most famous diary ever, Anne Frank's diary, hidden from the Nazis alongside its author in an Amsterdam house, 263 Prinsengracht, now one of Europe's most popular pilgrimage sites.

The other two books addressed in this essay are not strictly about books. One is about an author (John Updike) and the other about a fictional character (Frankenstein's monster). What do these six books have in common? Literature and obsession. Mark Garvey, in the bewildered tone of an over-the-top collector, writes about his various copies of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style: "I am apparently unable to pass up nicely preserved editions in used-book stores." Ammon Shea has "several walls worth of dusty and shedding dictionaries." Nicolson Baker measures his literary achievements against the elder Updike. Susan Hitchcock owns some 150 Frankenstein-related items—tea towels, toys, aprons, socks, cereal boxes, Lord-knows-what. In an interview in Wired magazine she said about Frankenstein: A Cultural History, "I admit it. This has been an obsession."

The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World
Paul Collins.
Bloomsbury, 2009, 256 pp., $25

Search for "Shakespeare" as a subject in the British Library catalog, and you get over 16,000 titles. The Library of Congress has over 7,000 works on Shakespeare—twenty years' reading, if you read one a day—and about 4,000 new books and articles on Shakespeare are published each year. There is even a whole library devoted to Shakespeare: the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., established in 1930 by the oil magnate Henry Clay Folger (it opened two years later, after Folger's death). As my father would say, the world needs more Shakespeare books like Carter needs little liver pills. Yet Paul Collins makes the Bard his subject in The Book of William, a masterpiece of Shakespeareana.

The key is in the subtitle: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World. This refers to the first collection of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623, seven years after the playwright's death, by his theater colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell. As the last living members of Shakespeare's acting company, the King's Men, the two wanted to memorialize their friend. So they scraped together thirty-six of his plays, eighteen of which had never been published, and gave them to the printer William Jaggard, who released them as Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. The world knows it as the First Folio.

Jaggard printed about a thousand copies of the book. Roughly 230 of them survive. The Folger Library owns 79 of that 230—more than any other person or institution in the world. (Who owns the second most? No one in the United States or England or even the Western hemisphere. It's Meisei University in Japan.) Aside from a Gutenberg Bible or...