but we all have comparative advantages that we have to make, and i intend to go after corrupt republicans as i have with thad cochran. i'm not interested in being part of a political tribe. my christian views are such that you shall know the truth, and it shall set you free. i'm not interested in being, you know, i believe in principles over parties and over people. and i think registering to vote anding with a part of -- and being a part of a republican machine while it's fun for a lot of people and i think it's important, honestly, my value added, like i don't want even leave the house to get food. i'm working all the time from six a.m. to nine p.m. my wife literally pulls me away so we can go on date night. this is the cause of my life. i'm happy to work as long as necessary. and i really, i don't want to sully the kind of aggressive, go after the truth message that i'm bringing by being a part of any campaign.

now, that might change. if certain people were to run for president who endorse my book, i would certainly consider getting involved with their campaign. [laughter] i might even do research for their super pac, you know? that might be interesting in the future. but as for the rest of it, you know, i've been involved in politics, i've helped numerous people get elected, i've helped a lot of people lose very successfully. [laughter] be and i do agree with you that the importance of voting is extremely important, but i would also say that your right as a citizen, your rights -- you have so many more rights than just the ballot box. you have the right to first amendment expression, the right to petition your government, you have all these different rights, and i see the voting component as a very small piece of it. if i'm sful which i believe i will be and the evidence is supporting it, i want to split the senate seat at age 25. why not?

my wife talks about it, tries to convince me of it. i am worried about my safety, and i have reason to be worried about my safety. so as long -- i'm hoping to get more people involved so that i can just sit back and collect a check like matt drudge. [laughter] but, i mean, i'm trying to give you as honest an answer as i can. it is a fair point. lots of people do suffer for the elections, and thank you for having me. [laughter] [applause] >> thank you very much. >> you're watching booktv, it's for serious readers. you can watch any program you see here online at booktv.org. >> up next, stephen grant talks about henry and emily folger, the collection of shakespeare books and manuscripts they started collecting in 1885 and the creation of the folger shakespeare library. this event was hosted by

politics & prose bookstore in washington d.c. it's just under an hour. >> thank you, justin. and thank you, politics & prose. authors are so lucky that p and p is here for them. biographers seek to capture a life. in this case, it was two lives. i wrote a dual biography of henry and emily tollier, a couple from brooklyn. henry and emily jordan folger were born in the 1850s when many american families had only two books this their library -- in their library; the bible and

shakespeare be. they died childless in the 19 1930s. i searched in vain for someone who remembered them. the closest i got was an octogenarian who had attended the dedication of the folger library in 1932 on shakespeare's birthday in reasons of president and mrs. herbert hoover. i beseeched her, what do you remember? she confided in me, my leggings itched. [laughter] what did the folgers leave behind for a biographer?

first, a handsome, white marble edifice of neoclassical design two blocks from capitol. that contains a world class rite research library, a theater where shakespeare and other plays by award-winning directors are performs. are performed. there is a renaissance concert series called the folger consort. there are curated exhibits, robust programs in poetry and education, communications and outreach. and a cohort of dedicated do

sents will show -- doe sents will show you the public spaces while in the reading rooms english professors and shakespeare scholars are consulting rare and even irreplaceable literary works from 1476 which marks the introduction of printing in england to 714, the death of queen anne. the couple responsible for this seed collection, the followiers -- folgers, collected 92,000 books. it was ap average of six books a day that arrived at his business address which was 26 broadway. there are 82 copies of shakespeare's first folio, the

1623 compilation of 36 shakespeare plays, 18 of which would have been lost because they had not been printed. each one of these 82 copies is different in some way? the folgers collected 204 paintings. most of them related to shakespeare. they collected furniture, tapestries, books, a quarter of a million playbills. this edifice, i want you to remember, is a library, a theater, a museum ask a mausoleum.

because there is a bronze plaque in the reading room behind which are two urns and their ashes. what else did the folgers leave behind that might give a biographer some notion of what made them tick? they left behind no daily diary, no love letters. i did find two bulging scrap scrapbooks which chronicled their college years. henry went to amherst. emily went to vassar. they both graduated in 1879. going to college for henry and emily was a big deal.

none of their hasn'ts had been to college. they even graduated phi beta kappa. emily was president of her class at vassar for life. [laughter] henry graduated -- >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> henry graduated my in his class. they went on to get masters degrees. henry's was at columbia in law, emily got a master's degree in shakespeare studies in a year when there were only 250 women in the country that obtained that advantage advanced degree. they both received honorary

doctorates from amherst college, honorary doctorates in letters. one of the things that i came upon early in my research was a collection of theater ticket stubs. luckily, the followiers didn't throw very much away. 125 shakespeare plays they went to, i'm looked at -- i've looked at the stubs, i know where they sat. [laughter] much more useful however than the ticket the stubs was emily eat play diary. she wrote up each of the performances. not only the name of the play, name of the central actors, the date and location, she would write about whether in her

opinion the actors caught the spirit of the may. she would give pronouncements about facial moment that ve observed. was there an actor who -- [inaudible] she would include comments in her diary. this is an unexploited mine for someone who was interested in looking at performance of shakespeare mays from the 1890s through 1930s. then i came across four archival boxes of a very forbidding nature.

you probably have some archival boxes, stiff cardboard about this size. i opened it up, and each of these four around kyl boxings -- archival boxes was full of checks, canceled checks. thousand, a biographer today would have very bad luck looking around for four archival box of canceled checks. however, once i had gotten over the panic of figuring out that for the next three weeks i would be looking only at checks because there were 10,000 of them, i came to realization that a checkbook is an autobiography. it shows where your values and your interests lie.

i brought a tape measure into the folger vault. this is underground vault, you don't usually get to see it. i wanted to find out what i had gotten myself into, was i knew about the check, but what else was in what's referred to as folger collection? these are personal papers, so i'm not saying the 92,000 books. i came up with 424 lip car feet. more than a football field of materials that i should go through with my natural tendency to leave no stone unturned. of this am of archive, 258 linear feet were book auction catalogs. that's two-thirds of a football

field. for someone who is buying antikaren books, there's no more important tool than a book auction catalog. folger, of course, saved all of the mailing labels, so i know where they came from. mainly london. where folger dealt with 150 booksellers. but also from new york. the person who went through all of these book auction catalogs was not henry. they arrived at 26 broadway where he worked. he brought hem home, and it was emily who went through all of the, those catalogs. she had a pencil with her. when she saw an item that she thought belonged in their collection. she would write a wavy line in the margin next to the item.

if she wasn't sure, she would put a question mark or two. she would turn the corner down so that when henry came back after his day job, he could go through the catalogs and to to right to the pages where there was an item as though she were saying, henry, we need these if our election, don't we. henry's job ban where emily's ended. he would spend first part of the night figuring out how much he would bid on the items that emily had preselected. emily calls keep the card got -- card catalog. she went poo a lot of detail about the quality of description, the quality of each, whether they were facsimiled title pages, and it got very detailed.

so when you're doing research, you go where the story takes you. and when henry came home from his day job, let me the tell you about his day job. one week after henry graduated from are college, he started working for john d. rockefeller at the standard oil company. he started as a that keys call clerk. he was one of the few college graduates in standard oil. he resigned after 49 years in the firm. his last two positions were president and chairman of the board of standard oil company of

new york. he was also a director of standard oil company of new jersey. now, socony became mobile, standard oil company of new jersey became exxon. so you have an idea of how well he did since he heavyily -- he followed rockefeller's advice and to invest heavily in the firm. so i was saying that you go where story leads you. one of the archives that i had to visit was the rockefeller around vives in new york. another one i had to create was the art archives at the university of texas. so i had made a conscious decision that i would not only write about how folger spent his money, but how he earned it. i thought that would make sense,

and it would be interesting, it would fill in a gap for some readers. so those who are particularly interested in the business side, in the petroleum side of the folger story, let me recommend chapters three and four. [laughter] so my challenge was to understand and to convey how did folger do it. how did he rise to the top of two fields, the petroleum industry in the world and antiquarian, rare books especially shakespeare and the elizabethark n and the ya coke january period. folgers had no chirp. they had no private yacht the disact them. they had no string of racehorses.

they accepted no business luncheons. they had no business receptions in hair home. in their home. they limited their family reunions the twice a year. they were single mindedly devoted to provide. are you familiar with the phrase bar dollar tree? [laughter] the excessive worship of -- [inaudible] the folgers were guilty as charmed. unabashed. although the folgers believed firmly that shakespeare wrote shakespeare, they developed a very important election of book on the authorship controversy.

and they loved to collect torglies of shakespeare. chapter six might interest some people from the west coast or people interested in rivalry because folger was not alone in trying to get his hands on is certain books. one of his main competitors was henry huntington. in the west coast, in san marino, california, you have the huntington library, museum and gardens. henry huntington's pockets were much deeper than folger's. for instance, he bought be 200 spire libraries -- entire libraries whereas folger bought just a few entire libraries. but they had situate objectives

in their electing. like jpmorgan, momentummington loves binding. so interest in decorative bindings. minely w from the 19th century. morgan and huntingtop liked the perfect book, the prison teak book. folger was unimpressed with the pristine book. what he loves was marry nail ya, writing in the margins. which showed how readers reacted to the content. so if you take the first folio, the 82 copies that are in the folger, you have a number of people who are inspired by shakespeare, and they wrote their own poems in the first photo. if they were an rest, they flew out of the photo. if they thought knew -- the

queen's english. they contracted foley in the first folio. and a last difference between huntington and folger was what they would do with their duplicates. huntington, of course, had a lot more having bought 200 entire libraries. huntington sold his duplicates. he had book auction catalogs made of his duplicates, and i've read them. and who bought some of the dukely candidates? folger. folger gave all his duplicates away. he gave a lot to amherst, he gave to relatives, but he didn't sell 'em. he might have -- he traded them on some occasions. three biographies have been written about henry huntington and not one yet about folger. so i thought i'd better do something about that.

i found that research and writing are lonely pursuits. fortunately, in washington, d.c. there is a support group. it's called the washington biography group. we meet once a month in the washington international school. mark has been the leader of this group for more than a quart or century -- quarter century. he worked decades at the smithsonian, and one of his last jobs was director of the portrait gallery. and mark begins every meeting with this mantra. he says, we are not a book club that reads and discusses books. all of us love to read biography. many of us are writing woig my.

a few of us are in peril of becoming the sun of a biography. [laughter] the subject of a biography. as i look around this group, i see members of the washington biography group, and that's part of what we do. we support each other during our meetings. everyone speaks. we do -- we go around the table. we address a theme for the second part of our monthly meeting. i would also think as i look around this group today that there might be some budding biographers here. now, could i ask the members of the washington biography group to raise their hands so we can see who they are. >> one, two, three, four.

all right. so i'm not going to ask the budding biographers to raise their hands, but i'm going to suggest that you know who they are, and you might want to look them up afterwards and get together. because the washington biography group is always looking for new members. there are new members that come to every member. to every meeting. there's one item that i'd like to draw your attention to k and that is the author's photo in the book "collecting shakespeare." a publisher often asks an author for a photo, and often an author send in a professional head shot. i didn't do that. i suggested it, and the editorial community accepted a wall shot. and i will explain what i mean

by that. this is the author's photo that you can't all see, but it's on the table. it is -- so the photograph was taken in the interior east side of the reading room in the folger lay library. the photographer was robert c.loutman, architectural photographer. this was his last photograph. he died at age 85. i am very small in this picture. i have on either side of me henry and emily folger clad in their academic gowns. ..

they both loved shakespeare. i find this the greatest in anglo-american literary history. the last five that i will share

with you before we go to the questions or comment i will quote from a letter that henry wrote the librarian of congress in january 1930, 6 months before the soldier died. he wrote to herbert putnam b's words and this is an excerpt from a longer letter. he said i have been wondering a great deal whether i will ever be able to get a volume published in my honor. and now i can say that henry, you've waited 84 years but now you have one. thank you. [applause]

i told you i was quite sure what was coming before the event [inaudible] you are saying being a collector can take one's life, take over one's life. i know because i am one and my question is what do you collect? >> fair question. the folgers were smitten by the collecting bug. mine has been of vintage postcards which i collected mainly in parisian boutiques, but before i became a biographer, i produced three books on picture postcards in the three countries i served

when i was a foreign service officer. so the answer to that is picture postcards. i'm not a member of the club. i don't go to the collecting of tears. but it helped me in writing about a collector to be one. thank you. >> i've read the book. it's very well done. congratulations. you mentioned henry folger had a list of retirement projects that he never got to. the last one of which was a memoir of book collecting. any good stories you left out of the book that you could share tonight? >> that's a good question. what is not in the book? [laughter] it's a little bit difficult for

me to sort out what's in there and what isn't in there. certainly i would say about folger that he applied secrecy to all of his actions in obtaining real estate and purchasing the antiquarian books that he was after. so, for instance, he wouldn't sign any of his tables folger, he signed them golfer. i haven't talked about the fact that folger was a regular golf partner of his boss, john d. rockefeller, but there are a lot of other stories in there. unfortunately, as a collector, henry had a hard time stopping to collect to sit down and write the stories.

he wrote very well in his freshman year he wrote letters to his pairings and that's where i got the idea of how he could write. he wrote about a 1619 book which was a pirated compilation of mine courthouse of shakespeare and he called it the most precious book in the world. he said that in the article to american magazines that rejected it and finally it was published by the new outlook. so we can only imagine what he might have written down if he had more time. but luckily he left out some of those stories.

>> was their only home in brooklyn complex and the second question, did their paths cross the path of rosenbach? >> the folgers were married in elizabeth new jersey and in their early years they lived with in the least. and there were all pretty standard oil refineries in that area as some of you know having drift further. they moved to brooklyn in the 1880s and in 1895, they relocated to a larger house in the bedford stuyvesant area of brooklyn. what was the second question asked rosenbach is a figure that

appeared in chapter six because he was the main provider of the books for both huntington and folger. he was a master bookseller and dancer dancing back and forth between the two collectors keeping them both happy and he might say for instance mr. folger, are you interested in this? i will be going to california next week. [laughter] so, there is a marvelous biography of rosenbach which is available i recommend it to all of you. >> in your research did you come up with an answer of why

washington? this was not a cultural capital. there was no great university and only later did it obscene some prominence in that area. >> henry didn't write exactly why but let me give you a couple of elements of the answer. i came across the ten locations it was in alphabetical order and it could only have related to where he was considering putting the library. she does admit that they were exerting the most pressure on him that you could understand. one is going to be amherst college.

he did not only gone to amherst but in his well he asked amherst to be the administrator of the library. brooklyn is also on the list and so was nantucket on the list. that doesn't sound right but for 30300 years the soldiers have bn looking on nantucket. that's where the originally settled in the six excuse. so, i mentioned that folger was fifth in his class at amherst area the valedictorian of the class was named franklin in franklin was the person that

said if you want to put your library and the best place this is 1919 when they met. i suggest you put it in washington, d.c.. i wouldn't have said this 40 years ag ago but there's no rean that washington, d.c. could not and should not be a cultural capital as well as a political capital. at this time you have relatively few cultural buildings. you have the smithsonian, the library of congress and folger did write i decided to write it in washington because i am a patriot.

>> i'm going to take advantage of the open mic. i've read your book and enjoyed it much. i concentrated on chapters three and four and that led me to try to figure out how henry clay folger ended up with 45% of the petroleum company. and you said later in the book that it was the money that he made from this investment that may be in quotation marks because i think there are a couple of indictments involved both federal and state but that it was the proceeds from the petroleum company that basically enabled the folgers to build the

library. >> that's correct. the standard oil company 26 broadway in manhattan was known as the town of secrecy. very difficult to find out what was going on. and if someone went up to john d. rockefeller and asked a question going back over time we don't have our claims and we can't hope you with that. so it wasn't easy to try to piece together the role of the magnolia and oil companies. i did not find it very much visitinvery muchvisiting the stl archives in austin texas but the library of congress has a lot of

books and that is certainly a source. henry often remained under the radar in terms of being the face of standard oil. he was by nature a very shy and reserved person and he gave only one interview in his life. whereas rockefeller bore the brunt of representing the company into being the object of scrutiny by journalists such as ida tarbell and others. folger was indicted in texas with other high-ranking executives at standard oil.

but they were not convicted and they did not serve any time. so the best i try to do in chapter three is to bring out the importance of the one oil company which heretofore generally hadn't been associated with folger or the fact that allowed him and another senior executive to have the resources that allowed them to buy their portfolios. but i don't get many questions about the business side of it so i am pleased to have that. the >> i have another question bu tt i have to get to the microphone.

>> for those that have not read your book there is a delightful story that you include and maybe you could repeat it for those that haven't heard of that remark that john d. rockefeller made about is disapproval of wasting money on the collection of such antiquity. >> i mentioned that they played golf together. mondays at ten. the story is that leaving the green one-day rockefeller said i read in the papers that you paid $100,000 for a book and then he

paused and henry bolt because he hated to have any of his booksellers divulge what he paid for the buck in the press" he answered was you know how the press exaggerates. [laughter] john responded i'm glad to hear you say that, henry because my brother and i and other board members would not want to think that the president of one of our companies was foolish enough to pay $100,000 for the buck. [laughter]

>> i heard from the advancement for science -- >> could you repeat? >> who creates the ones who collect the rocks? who grades them because [inaudible] >> or any conflict between the collectors, that sort of thing.

the book collectors like soldier wanted by. you might have henry soldier and huntington who are after the portfolio and they were by the action catalog and they would read it and the auction catalo catalogs. if he did o bid on a book and ie he would compare the buck with the description and they often wrote back and said you said that there were only three

pages. i found six weeks of coming either i want you to take 25% of the price or am going to send it back. so, he had a lot more back-and-forth when the books came. he also insisted on inspection so he might look at a book and send it back. so, if he collected 92,000 books we don't really know how many he sent back. >> i was wondering if you could tell us where it came from? we know he wasn't necessarily sad pity bibliophiles so they have a passion that be shared and if you can tell any

artifacts. the first book of shakespeare that henry owned was complete works and present from his younger brother i still find it amazing t three 1875 henry was a freshman at amherst. a younger brother might have been what? fifteen. another buying it and giving it to an older brother, how prophetic. but what a mature gift from a high schooler. and only.

you will come across the name in the book probably 70 times because charles pratt was henry folger's crewmate and his father founded the institute that is still going today. and i noticed some alumni in the house. they know about pratt fueled and of the dormitory. so, the home in the 1882 was the location of a lot of the literary salons and that is where they are thought to have

met and pretty soon they both became an officer and recited shakespeare. they were cut out of the same cloth and when you go through and leaves scrapbook it isn't very far from west point and you see he had a few dates but it depends to -- it didn't stick. >> i was wondering if there was a particular book or document the soldiers really valued that they considered the most valuable part of their collection >> the book that i referred to that rosenbach called the most precious book in the world this

was 1619 and is referred to and it's about that size. it is the book that he is holding in his hand and the oil portrait in the reading room. rosenbach bought the copy from perry who is a book collector from providence and as soon as he got it coming went to the standard oil company and asked to be admitted to the 13th floor of the executive suite. and he wanted to see mr. folger.

and he was told he is in an executive committee meeting. and they are not to be disturbed. rosenbach scribbled something on a piece of paper and said please handed this to mr. folger. [laughter] so a few minutes later, he came out and said you bought a more sedentary collection will you sell it to me? this time, rosenbach didn't say actually i was just on my way to san marino california. he said you have it. >> was awasn't a 100,000 powerb? for >> it was purported to be in the press a 100,000 powerbook.