Lecture | Collecting Shakespeare’s First Folio in America

This talk by David Alan Richards, Grolier Club member (and former Council member), will cover centuries of Shakespeare's First Folios arriving in America. The first made its way to Boston in 1791, and the first offered by an American book dealer was at Astor House on Broadway in 1847. By the turn of the 20th century, the two greatest assemblers of Shakespeariana, Alexander Cochran who founded the Elizabethan Club in New Haven, and Henry Clay Folger, who founded the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., collectors and rivals, revolutionized the worlds of book collecting and Bardolatry before the First World War. They established the national dominance in the holdings of First Folios in the United States today.

David Alan Richards is the world’s largest collector of the books and manuscripts of Rudyard Kipling. He has served on the Grolier Club's Council (2003-2009, 2011-2020) and chaired numerous club committees. Topics of his exhibitions and books include Kipling, Yale’s library, and Yale's secret societies, and his board service for nonprofit organizations includes his current term as President of the London-based Kipling Society.

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