Stories of Books: Cultural Explorations

Andrea E. Mays has degrees in economics from SUNY Binghamton and from UCLA, and teaches economics at California State University at Long Beach. The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger's Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio (Simon & Schuster), her first book, tells the miraculous and romantic story of the making of the First Folio, and of the American industrialist whose thrilling pursuit of the book became a lifelong obsession. Today it is the most valuable book in the world. Recently one sold for over five million dollars. It is the book that rescued the name of William Shakespeare and half of his plays from oblivion. The Millionaire and the Bard is a literary detective story, the tale of two mysterious men—a brilliant author and his obsessive collector—separated by space and time. It is a tale of two cities—Elizabethan and Jacobean London and Gilded Age New York. And it is the thrilling tale of the luminous book that saved the name of William Shakespeare “to the last syllable of recorded time.”

James Grissom has written for HBO, Showtime, CBS, and NBC. At a moment in the life of Tennessee Williams when he felt he had been relegated to a “lower artery of the theatrical heart,” when critics were proclaiming that his work had been overrated, he summoned to New Orleans a hopeful twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written an unsolicited letter to the great playwright asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on the playwright’s behalf to find out if he, Tennessee Williams, or his work, had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him. This journey is chronicled in Grissom’s Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog (Knopf), which Publishers Weekly calls, “. . . a kaleidoscope meditation on the people that entered Williams’ imagination—“the fog”—to become his signature characters.”

Rebecca Rego Barry is the editor of Fine Books & Collections magazine, a glossy quarterly for book & fine art collectors, dealers, curators, and librarians. She has written about books for Preservation, the Barnes & Noble Review, The Awl, the Daily News/Page Views, American Libraries, Publishers Weekly, and many other periodicals, as well as WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places (Voyageur Press) she recounts the stories of remarkable discoveries from the world of book collecting that will entertain and inspire casual collectors and hardcore bibliomaniacs alike.