 A biographer tries to capture or to resurrect a life. I wrote a dual biography of Henry and Emily Folger, a quiet couple who lived in Brooklyn. They were born in the 1850s, died in the 1930s. His day job was working in the petroleum industry. His boss was just not any boss. His boss was John D. Rockefeller Sr. And Henry Folger worked for 49 years for this company investing his stock and his dividends. So Folger had a dilemma. How was he going to spend his disposable income? He did not order a private railroad car the way some of the tycoons of the gilded age did. He did not have a private yacht. He did not own a string of racehorses. He did not pass any money to his children because this was a childless couple. So unilaterally, he put all of his savings into putting together the largest collection of Shakespeare in the world. So you will not find the largest collection of Shakespeare in Stratford upon Avon. You won't find it in Oxford or in London. That's two blocks from the U.S. Capitol and I would like to tell you the story. An early picture of Henry Folger in Brooklyn. Look at what he has in his hand. It's not a toy, it's a book. This is the first book out of 92,000 books that Henry Folger acquired in his lifetime. Now I'm going to introduce you to Henry's bride-to-be who is somewhat taken aback at the idea of such a book collection. That is Emily. This is Emily Jordan who is in her calico dress and we are going to fast forward a few years until she receives her bachelor's degree from Vassar College in 1879. She is elected president of her class of 16 students, president for life. Her favorite subjects were foreign languages, theater, and astronomy. And if you know something about Vassar, you may know that it was founded by two beer brewers Matthew Vassar who believed fervently that women were the intellectual equals of men and deserved to have an institution of higher learning where they could go. And not only did Emily get a bachelor's degree, she returned later to get a master's degree at Vassar in Shakespeare studies. So she was the Shakespeare scholar of the two, but there were different kinds of scholars. In 1896, only 250 women in the country got master's degrees. So she was a very special woman. She was referred to as a blue stocking, that is an intellectual woman. Peter Folger Museum and note the spelling of Folger. It's one of the early spellings of Folger. And if you've read about Shakespeare, you probably know that Shakespeare signed his name many different ways. Spelling was not uniform in the 16th and 17th century. The first Folger that came to the New World was this man after whom a museum in Nantucket was named. Has anyone here been to Nantucket? That's pretty good. I should have asked, did anyone here go to Vassar? I don't see a hand. So the Peter Folger Museum is the same thing as the Whaley Museum. And I went to Nantucket to do research for this book. And I opened the telephone book and they were five Folger families. So they are still residents of the island. Peter Folger came with his father, who was probably illiterate. Peter was not. He was already a tradesman. They came in 1635 as part of the Great Migration from East Anglia. These were times when a number of people, educated people in England were not happy with the religious situation and wanted to go to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They had heard that they would be more free to believe the way they wanted to. And the Folgers were one of them. Peter Folger fell in love on the transatlantic journey with a woman by the name of Mary Morrill. They had nine children. The last child was a daughter by the name of Abaya, A-B-I-A-H. And as I explained in my book, Abaya married Josiah Franklin, a soap maker in Boston. And they had a child, Benjamin Franklin. For those of you who have looked at the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, you might remember that when he was in England, he looked up his genealogical roots. So Benjamin Franklin's mother was a Folger, Abaya. Grandfather was a Folger, Peter Folger. There's another connection with Folgers, which has to do with California. This may not be a surprise to you. You probably heard of Folger's coffee before you heard of the Folger Shakespeare Library or the Folger Shakespeare Theater. A lot of the Folgers who lived on Nantucket Island, as you might imagine, were involved in the whaling trade. They were sea captains. They made harpoons. They were blacksmiths. When the whaling trade plummeted in the 1840s, there were a number of Folgers who had to leave the island because there's no way that they could make a living. And James went to California to look for gold, the time of the gold rush. He didn't find much gold. He found some dust. But he discovered that the quality of coffee that people were brewing was insipid. He said, I can do better than that. So with a partner in 1872, he founded James A. Folger Coffee. And there I am next to the office, which used to be the factory. Who can identify the location? Well, tell everyone else. It's right around the corner from Speer. It's 101 Howard. Yeah. You're right. You're right. Look at the safe that's in there. So now it's an optometrist's office. So I just knocked on the door. And what I did was I showed them my iPhone. This is my iPhone. My iPhone has my book cover as an iPhone cover. So they said, what's that all about? And they said, oh, well, this man that I wrote about is related to James A. So their relationship was nephew and uncle. So the founder of Folger's Coffee was the uncle of Henry Folger. So think of that one family, one who made a killing in coffee, the other one who made a killing in oil, two very important products for our country. All right. We're going to jump to Amherst College, where Henry Folger graduated in 1879. Do we have an Amherst alum in the hall? I guess I'm the only one. And that's where I learned about Henry Folger by going to Amherst College. I graduated 84 years after Henry did. Now I'm going to tell you which one is Henry. He's right in the middle. Look how well they dressed, 1879. This looks like a cat, but it's not. It's a little sign giving the name of their fraternity, because this was a big time for fraternities. Henry belonged to Alpha Delta Phi. He loved music. He sang in the Alpha Delta Phi quartet. He sang in the Amherst College Chapel, Amherst College Glee Club. And he sang in a performance of HMS Pinafore that came out the year before. So music was very important for this man. As we look at Henry, I want to identify the man that we see here next to him. His name is Charles Millard Pratt. Charles Pratt's father founded Pratt Institute. And I'm seeing some nods, which is still a technical vocational school today. But something else that Charles Pratt's father did was to refine oil, mainly in Brooklyn. Anyone here from Brooklyn? Yes. All right, well that's very cool. So Charles Pratt's father in 1869 was the largest oil refiner in the country. And three years later he was bought out by John D. Rockefeller, who was moving from Ohio where he came from. So all of these young men prepared for college at Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn. Now you have two couples and they're both Amherst Vassar couples. And I've talked about most of them. Let's start with Emily, whom you saw when she was taken aback at age two. Now she's married. She is the studio portrait. She's sitting down and her left elbow is in the lap of Mary Morrill Seymour, who married Charles Pratt. So there's Charles. There is Henry who is sprouted a mustache. Remember he was clean shaven when he graduated. And these two couples spent a lot of time together. They were utterly devoted to each other. Henry and Charlie left Amherst one week after commencement to start working at Standard Oil Company in New York. And they both became presidents of Standard Oil Companies. Mary and Emily taught in Brooklyn for as long as they could. As soon as they got married they weren't allowed to teach anymore. You probably are aware of that. Now this is somewhat later. We're changing centuries. So this is the 20th century. Who can identify the person in the middle? John Dee. That's right. So this is 1908. This is John Dee Rockefeller, who is leading a delegation from the Manhattan courthouse back to the headquarters of Standard Oil Company, which was at 26 Broadway. 26 Broadway was referred to as the Tower of Secrecy, because so many things went on there that people didn't know about. John Dee didn't give any interviews. He didn't do that. So here you have John Dee. And he was leaving the courthouse because it was the end of one of the sessions in the four-year trial, the lawsuit, the Supreme Court against Standard Oil Company due to monopolistic practices. Rockefeller lost. And he was obliged to break up his company into 34 separate companies, one in each state where they had gas and oil projects. Behind John Dee are the two young attorneys who had been preparing his defense. They were probably up all night. They looked very tired. Look at the young messenger boys and how elated they are to get out of the office. And then there is someone who is on the left. He doesn't really fit in. He doesn't have an overcoat. He's not glum. He's not elated. He's somewhere in between. He has something under his arm. That is Henry Folger. Henry Folger was metaphorically and literally the right-hand man of John Dee Rockefeller. After Amherst, Folger went to Columbia Law School to get a degree. He didn't work in the law department of Standard Oil. But he had a very solid legal background. And John Dee loved the fact that he would perhaps get a different opinion from Folger than he would from his legal department. It was very useful to have Folger around. In addition to that, Folger had a photographic memory. And when people were asking who would write the history of Standard Oil or the history of petroleum, it was Folger. And he wrote encyclopedia articles about petroleum. So that is a very historic photo, which I first found in a book called America by Alastair Cook, member of Letters from America. That's where it is. So I had to buy that for the book. I think it was the most expensive. I had to buy the reproduction rights so that my publisher, Johns Hopkins Press, could use this. And it was owned by Brown Brothers. Okay, now here's another financial item. You probably didn't expect to see a canceled check on the screen. Let's look at this in some detail. Columbia Trust Company, New York, January 29, 1918, paid to the order of John D. Rockefeller from H.C. Folger. People called him H.C. to his face. In 1918, Henry's father died in 1914. So up until 1914, Henry would sign his name H.C. Folger, Jr., but the day that his father died, he was no longer junior. He was it. He was the older generation, $53,000. Now unfortunately, there's no stub. So I can't know what it covers. But I really do know because I spent six years going through the archives at the Folger Library. There are 424 linear feet of personal papers of the Folgers. That's a football field and a third. Let me see one more thing about this check and then something in general about checks. $53,000 in 1918 is $885,000 today. Why would anyone be writing such a huge check to the wealthiest man of all time? Well, think about what Henry Folger was doing. He was putting together a Shakespeare collection. He had a day job so he couldn't go to bookstores. He would hire commission agents to represent him at auctions. He would buy entire collections. And when you win a collection or when you win an item at an auction, you have to pay for it. So as wealthy as he was, he lived a life of short-term debt. He was always borrowing money and paying it back. He had nine accounts in banks and trust companies, and his boss was only too happy to loan him money at the going rate, 6%. So the reason that I show a check is that a checkbook is an autobiography. It shows where your values are. Henry left behind 10,000 checks, and I've scrutinized them all. This is a first folio. How many of you have heard the term first folio, about half? Folio is the size of a page back when Type was handset. It's about 10 inches by 13. If you take a page that size and you fold it in half, it becomes a quarto. So you hear about quartos and folio with Shakespeare. When Shakespeare's plays came out, they came out as individual plays as a quarto. Shakespeare was not interested in people reading his plays because you didn't do that. You performed them. There are very few plays that were printed. But after Shakespeare died, which was 1616, seven years later, two of his fellow actors and playhouse owners assembled a folio of 36 plays, 18 of which would have been lost. Had they not done that because they had not been printed. 2016 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. And the Folger Library decided that it would get funding to send an original first folio to all 50 states. And every state competed by putting together proposals. And California was a very tightly contested competition, as you might imagine, with all of the institutions. The winner was the public library at San Diego. And that's where I spoke last night. So I spoke in the same building as one of these first folios that was on display. If you want to see it, it'll be there until July 7th. So this is the title page, the title page, an engraving of Shakespeare. Then you have the 36 plays divided among comedies, tragedies, and histories. This is the page to which the first folio is opened in every single one of the 50 states. It's the to be or not to be soliloquy of Hamlet. There are 900 pages in this first folio, double columns. And Henry Folger bought 82 of them. About 700 were printed. And you might say, well, why did he buy so many? Well, they're all different. They're all different for many reasons. There were nine typesetters that put these folios together. And printing was really at its infancy. And there wasn't a lot of standardization. So one compositor would, he might change a word or might change a letter. Or a letter might be so worn they couldn't use it. So you couldn't have an H anymore. You use an R instead of an H. And then some of these volumes were bound. Some weren't. A number of people wrote over the years, over the centuries, in their copy of the first folio. We were told not to write in our books at one point, depending on your generation. Certainly not highlight with green and yellow and orange and so forth. So sometimes in the margins, readers would write a sonnet. So it's very cool to look at, and I've held probably a dozen of these in my hands, at the Folger Library. They don't insist on your wearing white gloves. They just want you to have clean hands, because gloves are not easy to turn pages with. You can do damage with gloves. So I can't, I'm not allowed in the vault myself, because I don't work at the Folger. I don't have security clearance to do that. But I write out on a call slip what I want to see, and then they'll bring it up to my desk. In addition to saving his checks, the Folgers save all of their ticket stubs. They went to 100 performances of Shakespeare. This is not Shakespeare directly. Henry Folger's senior year was the last time that Ralph Waldo Emerson came to Amherst to lecture. He was 76 years old. His daughter had to help him to the podium. Henry was very focused in his undergraduate life, not so much on literature, but on oratory. It's one of the things that people did. So there wasn't a better orator than Emerson. And Henry was just transfixed by listening to Emerson lecture. And even though the subject was not on Shakespeare, it drove Henry to read everything that Emerson had written about Shakespeare. So people say, why did the Folgers devote themselves to Shakespeare? Well, in the 1850s when they were born, most American families had in their library two books, the Bible and Shakespeare, if they had a library. So they were brought up reading, learning, quoting from both of those. Mailing labels, if they bought 92,000 books and it wasn't only books, they bought paintings, they bought engravings, manuscripts, furniture, armor, maps. Think of all the mailing labels they bought. They kept them all. Let's look at this one from Broadbent in London. Old books, duty free, printed over 20 years ago. Well, that's a good deal. You bring in a first folio that's centuries old and you don't pay any duty on it. H.C. Folger Esquire. There's the law degree. 26 Broadway, New York, USA. So they didn't bother putting the city and the state. There's the blue stocking. This is an oil portrait of Emily Jordan Folger, which hangs in the reading room at the Folger Library. Has anyone here been to the Folger Shakespeare Library? One, two, three. Well, that's pretty good. I'd love to talk with you afterwards. She is wearing her vassar pink hood and gown. In her hand, she has a fan, which is from the Shakespeare era. It has a scene from Henry V on it. Now I'm going to show you the companion oil portrait. Henry, who is wearing his amorous purple hood. In his hand, he has a book. Now you saw him before with the book. That was his first book. This may be book number, let's see, this was 1927. Maybe book number 71,820, something like that. But this is a very rare book. What he has in his hands was the only copy known to exist, printed in 1619. It's a pirated edition of nine Shakespeare Quartos. So the Quartos member are half the size of a folio, referred to as the Pavier Quartos. OK, now you've seen Henry as an infant. You've seen him at college. You've seen him portrayed in the painting. You saw him with his wife and with the prance. You haven't yet seen him in his, let's say, leisure retire, when he would get on the golf course with none other than his boss. He had a Monday morning golf date with John D. Rockefeller. Think of what they must have talked about on the golf course that we'll never know. Think how many industrial secrets, if only the caddies had been listening. And that's the thing that a biographer looks for. If a biographer can find a caddy that wrote a diary, how rich that would be. A number of people who write biographies of people who golf try to interview caddies. They say, what was he like? Oh, he gave horrible tips. I mean, you learn a lot of things if you can find people who unobtrusively have spent time with your subjects. And I know that the Folgers, Mrs. Folger, played a little golf in the afternoon. They both left very generous. Check out his golf club. Have you ever seen a putter like that? Are you looking at the putter? This is called a schenectady putter. And you address the golf ball as though you were addressing a croquet ball. It's not legal anymore because Bobby Jones got involved. But when Folger played, it was legal. And he won a number of senior tournaments. All right, I want you to figure out what's going on in this next picture. Whoops. No, I'm not quite there yet. So there is a relationship between this photo and the last one. And it has to do with John D. Rockefeller and dimes. Has anybody heard the story about John D. Rockefeller giving out dimes? I'm seeing a couple of nods. Reportedly, he gave away $35,000 to people that he didn't know and people that he knew. His valet stuffed his pockets with dimes. When he went to church, he would give out dimes. He played golf, he'd give out dimes. Henry, his nephew said, would get dimes when he sunk a 16-foot putt. And he saved all the dimes. And then he up and died. His widow said, oh, I know what I can do with those dimes. I can have a watch band made out of these dimes. So I've not held that watch band in my hands, but I have seen it because it's in the vault of the Folger. And I've checked the dates of all the mercury dimes on it. And they're all 1920. All right, so here's the picture. I want you to try to figure out what's going on. I see some puzzled faces. All right, let's start on the left. On the left, you have a podium, not unlike this one. There's a poster of my book on the podium. Because sometimes when I travel, I bring posters. Right above it, it says Homestead 250. Does anyone know about the Homestead Resort and Spa in Hot Springs, Virginia? I see a couple of nods. The Homestead is one of the grand, early hotels and spas. 250, and it's this year. I was there in March. So if they were celebrating their 250th, that means that they were founded in 1766, 10 years before our country. That's how old it is. And this year, it's the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. So I was invited to come to the Homestead to give a talk about Henry Folger. And I said, all right, now's the time. If I'm going to do it, I'm going to dress and speak as Henry Folger, which is what I did. So they also recorded me there, and it's on YouTube. So I tried to get into the Folger golf stance. And the reason that it's important for me that I go to the Homestead is that is the resort that the Folgers chose for their annual vacation for 16 years. The people at the Homestead had forgotten that. I had to remind them. And the records of the Folgers are, since they saved everything, you know that now, checks, mailing labels, ticket stubs, they saved all their invoices. So I know what they paid for their room every year. It started at $16 a night. I know what they paid for miscellaneous expenditures, livery, because they went out with horse and buggy. The cables, they brought down their card catalog so they could still send away cables and order books from the auction houses in London. Emily would take the waters, and Henry would play golf. They gave me the Folgers' old room, where they stayed from 1914 to 1929. And Henry had left his white bowler on the bed. This is where the Folgers lived in Brooklyn. It's in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood. It's a brownstone full of books. I visited it from the outside. I didn't dare knock on the door. Now, this is another building, and I want you to focus on what you see right here. Can you identify where we are? Yes. So we have moved from New York to Washington, DC, and that's the US Capitol. We are on East Capitol Street, and we're on East Capitol Street before the Folger library was built. This building was known as Grant's Row. Albert Grant was a developer, not related to me, because I'm another Grant. These are 14 red brick row houses. And Henry Folger, for many years, didn't know what he was going to do with his collection. He kept on collecting and collecting. And then people said, well, you have to build a library somewhere. And it ended up being in Washington, DC. So one by one, he bought up each of these 14 row houses and put them in his wife's name. He didn't want people to know that he was involved. And that's what happened. It's all gone. Empty lot. Here's that building that you see. Can somebody identify that? Library of Congress. Yes, that's the Library of Congress. That's the first building of the Library of Congress completed in 1897. There are two others now. Now I'm going to show you the architect of the Folger Shakespeare Library. French born, born in Lyon, went to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His name is Paul Philippe Cré, C-R-E-T. He became professor of design at Penn. He designed two buildings on the Mall, Federal Reserve Building and the Penn American Union. This is the day the Folger Library was dedicated. Shakespeare's birthday, April 23, 1932, it was the largest gathering of cultural people in Washington ever. The motorcycles of the Secret Service, 1932. Do you know who was president? Yeah. So there is Herbert Hoover and his wife Lou. It was very appropriate that he be the one to be present at the dedication because he was a book collector. He was a scientist. Had books that went back to the 16th century. This is the first aerial photo taken of the Folger that looks quite small compared to the Library of Congress and the Capitol. And what did this construction site become? And he guesses Supreme Court, the Folger Theater. And you would hear Ben in the Folger Theater? Yes. It's a very small theater, 260 seats. The reason it's small is that the Folgers were building a library. And they wanted the theater only as an example of Shakespeare or other plays. It wasn't the main focus of the building. Actors really like it because of the intimacy with the audience. This is the exhibition hall. They have three exhibits a year. I was talking with the lady in the second row who was going for later on in the year for the exhibit on Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Right now it's Shakespeare in America is the name of the exhibit. They also have three plays a year, two of which are generally Shakespeare. On the inside, it looks like British Renaissance style. On the outside, it doesn't. The Folgers wanted to have a Renaissance outside. And the architect said, you can't do that next to the Capitol. It just won't work. So as soon as you cross the threshold, you leave the marble, the Georgia marble, that fits in with all the government buildings. And you're in the 17th century. This is the reading room. Now this is where the scholars come. The Library of Congress is a public library. The Folger is private. The Library of Congress is general. The Folger is specific. It's Shakespeare. And the years that the Folger collected for their books were mainly from 1475 to 1715. And it was predominantly literary and about Shakespeare. The portraits that you saw earlier of the two are behind the photographer. And this is looking west. Emily is attired in a costume that belonged to the Shakespearean actress Julia Marlowe when she played Portia from The Merchant of Venice. And Henry wrote to the actress and said, I would like to buy your costume for my collection. And she agreed. She's in the Founder's room. Founder's room is in the administrative wing of the Folger. It's public space. Anyone can visit it. It's where the Folgers were going to retire to when they moved from New York to Washington. Henry died before the library was built. He never saw all of his books together. He died at age 72. Emily lived six years longer. So she's the one that presided over the opening. She's the one that made a lot of the decisions about hiring of staff at the Folger and the regulations for the readers, for the researchers. She also made decisions about the purchase of extension of the collection. Emily is looking at the portrait of her deceased husband, 1932. Emily is wearing an Amherst robe because she has received an honorary doctorate of letters by Amherst College in 1932, a very nice tribute to her who picked up the mantle and continued so that the Folger Library could open in 1932 for scholars. So now you can see where those two oil portraits hang. And the significance of this picture, and it's the last one I'll be showing you, is that my publisher asked me for an author headshot for the cover. And I thought about that. And I decided I wouldn't send them one. I wrote them, I'm going to send you a wall shot because look at the company that I'm keeping. I'm standing between my two subjects. And I'm standing underneath Will with his quill. This is a model of the bust that is in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford upon Avon next to the Bard's bones. And many of you, I guess, have been there or you have family who have. So the significance of this to me is that I have written a love story. Henry and Emily loved each other. They both loved Will. And I find that the greatest ménage à toi in literary history. Thank you very much.