The Book of William

Collins owns—without a doubt—the greatest job title we never knew we wanted: literary detective. As the resident sleuth for NPR’s Weekend Edition, it’s his job to sniff out scams, hoaxes and loads of colorful backstories on bookish matters. In a 2006 essay for The Believer, he teased out the origins of modern-day crime reporting as found in James Curtis, a British reporter who in 1827 chronicled a small-town murder. A copy of Curtis’s book on the subject was even enclosed in the executed murderer’s skin.

So Collins knows his way around a good literary mystery, and knows how to milk the bizarre and wonderful detail. All of which serves him well when it comes to tackling the greatest literary mystery of—we’ll just say it—all time, Shakespeare. But Collins isn’t trying to put to rest the hoary—and increasingly boring—question of whether Shakespeare wrote all of the plays we think he did. Instead, he’s written a history of the most sought-after and elusive rare books in the world, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. In other words, Shakespeare’s debut.

Collins begins at a Sotheby’s rare-book auction where, despite an entire wall of antiquarian Bibles, a first-edition of Ulysses and a signed copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the real star of the show is Shakespeare’s first folio. From there, Collins takes us back to its unscrupulous printer, William Jaggard, who produced a pirated—and half-faked—collection of Shakespeare’s poetry, leading the Bard to be “much offended.” As Collins writes, “But thanks to that early sordid act of piracy, William Jaggard bears a curious distinction in the otherwise poorly documented and indistinct life of our great playwright. He is the one man in the world that we know Shakespeare disliked.” Still, he was also a tremendously successful publisher, so after Shakespeare died, his actor friends contracted Jaggard to produce the first folio of his plays.

From there, Collins takes us on a tour of the folio’s life, broken chronologically into five acts. The book has been the source of envy and desire for everyone from 18th-century poet Alexander Pope to 20th-century oilman Henry Clay Folger. All the while, Collins travels into the weird world of Shakespeareana and rare-book collecting (which now, it turns out, is en vogue among Japanese elites).

If it’s not already clear by the very title of the book, The Book of William is filled with geeky delights. In a chapter about the Folger Library in D.C., Collins walks us through the relatively modern world of collating: checking one page against another to dredge up variations in the text, the printing, even the paper quality. Much of it is done via a simple and strange system of mirrors, tricking the brain to stop recognizing depth. It’s essentially a science lesson crammed two-thirds of the way through, but we’re with Collins when he finally gets the device working on a couple of old texts and exclaims, “I’ll be damned.”

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.

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