The Grolier Club Gazette: Collecting Shakespeare’s First Folio in America
David Alan Richards covers centuries of Shakespeare’s First Folios arriving in America, starting with the first one coming to Boston in 1791; and the first offered by an American book dealer at Astor House on Broadway in 1847. By the turn of the 20th century, the two greatest assemblers of Shakespeariana were Alexander Cochran, founder of New Haven’s Elizabethan Club, and Henry Clay Folger, founder of DC’s Folger Shakespeare Library; and these two rival collectors revolutionized the worlds of book collecting and Bardolatry before World War I, establishing America’s national dominance in the holdings of First Folios. Currently president of the London-based Kipling Society, Dave is the world’s foremost collector of Rudyard Kipling books and manuscripts, and he has curated exhibitions and given presentations on Kipling, as well as on Yale’s library and “secret societies.”
The Grolier Club Gazette: Collecting Shakespeare’s First Folio in America
in the media
Special Functions Lecture: “Collecting Shakespeare’s First Folio in America”
September 24, 2025, Grolier Club of New York City & on Livestream
