The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World Book

Who knew that following in the footsteps of a world-conquering first edition would be such an emotional experience. Starting at one and the same time at an auction house and the original printing house, Collins does an impressive job chronicling where the extremely limited edition came from, and whose grubby hands were lucky enough to hold on to them - turns out that Samuel Johnston, the creator of the first English dictionary, wins the messiest reader sweepstakes whereas another Johnson, the 16th century Prof of Mathematics William Johnstone gets the most-thorough annotator award as well as the happy distinction of being the first-known scholar of Shakespeare's plays. It got really emotional for me when Collins went to the land of tomorrow, Japan, to discover the future application for the First Folio, at Meisei University in Tokyo. Not only home to the second largest collection of Folios after the Folgers' collection in Washington, but also that one of the scholar working on the digitization of the texts happens to be related to world-famous filmmaker Akira Kurosawa had me in tears. Someday the words that Shakespeare wrote, scratched onto parchment with his own quill, may be found, but I will stick to the argument that the stack of pages Condell and Heminges originally commissioned are as close as we will get to Shakespeare's mind.