The first biography of Henry and Emily Folger, who acquired the largest and finest collection of Shakespeare in the world. In Collecting Shakespeare, Stephen H. Grant recounts the American success story of Henry and Emily Folger. Shortly after marrying in 1885, the Folgers started buying, cataloging, and storing all manner of items about Shakespeare and his era. Emily earned a master's degree in Shakespeare studies. The frugal couple worked passionately as a tight-knit team during the Gilded Age, financing their hobby with the fortune Henry earned as president of Standard Oil Company of New York, where he was a trusted associate of John D. Rockefeller Sr. While a number of American universities offered to house the collection, the Folgers wanted to give it to the American people. Afraid the price of antiquarian books would soar if their names were revealed, they secretly acquired prime real estate on Capitol Hill near the Library of Congress. They commissioned the design and construction of an elegant building with a reading room, public exhibition hall, and the Elizabethan Theatre. The Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on the Bard's birthday on April 23, 1932. The library houses 82 First Folios, 277,000 books, and 60,000 manuscripts. It welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year and provides professors, scholars, graduate students, and researchers from around the world with access to the collections. It is also a vibrant center in Washington, DC, for cultural programs, including theater, concerts, lectures, and poetry readings. With unprecedented access to the primary sources within the Folger vault, Grant draws on interviews with surviving Folger relatives and visits to 35 related archives in the United States and in Britain to create a portrait of the remarkable couple who ensured that Shakespeare would have a beautiful home in America.

This is the first biography of Capt. Peter Strickland, a little-known Connecticut Yankee who crossed the Atlantic 100 times in command of a sailing vessel, traded with French and Portuguese colonies during the period 1864-1905, and served as the first American consul to French West Africa for over 20 years. We know about Peter Strickland's long life (1837-1921) because he wrote a daily journal from the age of 19 until the year he died. He broke away from a long line of Connecticut farmers to adopt a seafaring life at the age of 15. Capt. Strickland's merchant marine career led him from the east coast of the United States to the west coast of Africa. He introduced American tobacco and wood products into French and Portuguese colonies and on the return trips carried animal hides and peanuts in his 100-ton schooners. He wrote and published a book on behalf of sailors. The most knowledgeable American in the African trade for 40 years, Strickland struggled to maintain an American competitive edge among the dominant commercial presence of French trading houses from Bordeaux and Marseilles. The U.S. State Department asked him to become the first consul in French West Africa, with residence in Senegal. The captain accepted the terms: he would receive no salary, but he could keep the port fees he collected and continue to practice his import-export business. Living on the former slave island of Gorée, Strickland battled epidemics of cholera and yellow fever. He suffered from malaria and catarrh. His 23-year-old son George accidentally drowned off the coast of Dakar, Senegal. Demoralized and ill, Strickland retired to Boston in 1905 and became a gentleman farmer. At age 77, he recopied his entire journal into bound volumes.

The true story of the Manson murders.

Written by distinguished historians with the force of a novel, this book reconstructs the web of religious ecstacy, greed, and seduction within the cult of the Prophet Matthias in New York in 1834 and captures the heated atmosphere of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Illustrations.

Originally published in 1972, Clarence King's novel, "The Half-Share Man" follows the exploits of Peter Folger, grandfather of Benjamin Franklin, as he follows his life's journey from a teenage boy, just trying to make it in the New World in 1635, to the point of becoming a surveyor asked to take part in the founding of the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard and becoming an integral part of their societies by taking on a number of other professions, including but not limited to, schoolteacher, surveyor, carpenter and farmer. Always driven to do what is right, Folger makes peace with native Indian tribes, as well as showing exactly where his famous grandson would get his sense of humor. Now published online, Clarence King's great-grandson has written the preface and has opened the story up to the world that only a select few on Nantucket Island have known for nearly half a century.

​Francine Mathews' no-nonsense Nantucket police detective, Merry Folger, is back on the case after nineteen years. ​Death on Nantucket, the fifth Merry Folger Mystery, is full of regional charm, a strong sense of local history, and foggy New England Island atmosphere. Spencer Murphy is a national treasure. A famous Vietnam War correspondent who escaped captivity in Southeast Asia, he made a fortune off of his books and television appearances. But Spence is growing forgetful with age; he’s started to wander and even fails to come home one night. When a body is discovered at Step Above, the sprawling Murphy house near Steps Beach, Nantucket police detective Meredith Folger is called in to investigate. The timing couldn’t be worse: It’s the Fourth of July, and tourists are arriving in droves to celebrate on Nantucket’s beaches, so the police force is spread thin. On top of that Merry is planning her wedding to cranberry farmer Peter Mason, and her new boss, an ex-Chicago police chief with an aggressive management strategy, seems to be trying to force her to quit. Merry can’t conclude the Murphy investigation quickly enough for him. As she grapples with a family of unreliable storytellers—some incapable of recalling the past, and others determined that it never be known—she suspects that the truth may be forever out of reach, trapped in the failing brain of a man whose whole life may be a lie.