Great Hall – In Collecting Shakespeare, Stephen H. Grant recounts the American success story of Henry Clay Folger. Jr. (son of Nantucket-born Henry Clay Folger, Sr.) and his wife Emily. The Gilded Age couple were devoted to each other, in love with Shakespeare, and bitten by the collecting bug.

Shortly after marrying in 1885, the Folgers settled in New York City and started buying, cataloging, and storing Shakespeare artifacts using the fortune Henry earned as president of Standard
Oil Company.

The pair secretly acquired prime real estate on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, near the Library of Congress, and opened the Folger Shakespeare Library on the Bard’s birthday – April 23, 1932. The library houses 82 First Folios, 275,000 books, and 60,000 manuscripts, serves as an important research resource and welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year. Grant was given unprecedented access to the primary sources and draws on interviews with Folger relatives and visits to 35 related archives and has created a portrait of the remarkable couple who ensured that Shakespeare would have a beautiful home in America.