thanks, everybody. >> thank you so much for coming. get a book, get it signed. if you could do us a favor and fold up your chairs. let's have another roundf applause for steve. [applause] >> booktv records hundreds of author programs throughout the country all year long. here is look at events we will cover this week. on monday, we are in clermont, california talking to professors who are authors of books. and we will be at the jimmy carter museum on tuesday to hear about from a speaker about

president johnson. and we will look at the live of first lady adams in brooklyn, new york. we will be back in new york city friday for new yorker staff writer report on the literary curriculum that most engaged students at three different high schools over the course of an academic year. next saturday we are live for the annapolis book festival. and that is a look at some of the authorer programs booktv will be covering this week. many of these events are open to the public. look for them to air into the fear future. >> booktv took a tour of the folger shakespeare library in washington, d.c. it holds the largest shakespeare collection in the world.

here is a portion of that. >> this is the most complete volume of shakespeare work and it is important his friend assembled it because they had a better idea of what he liked. they said here is comedies, histories, and tragedies and helped us as literary critics. this engraving was part of the book. it is missing from some copies. it is very valuable in and of itself. ben johnson, who knew shakespeare, said this is the likeness of that man. and this is important because it is a person-to-person familiar connection to shakespeare. >> so if 82 folios in the shakespeare collection, correct? >> correct. >> how many worldwide? >> 233. >> if somebody wanted to buy one

what would it cost? >> complete first folio's go for $5-$6 million dollars. >> you have them going around the country right now? >> we do. it matters when you come face to face with someone from shakespeare so we realized we could safely take one to all 50 states and the territoryies and that is what is happening now. the response has been tremendous. someone proposed marriage on the case of the first folio visit in oklahoma. there is a jazz funeral for shakespeare coming in new orleans. a jazz funeral shakespeare. there is a great indy rock broadband doing a concert for the first folio in duluth.

we are inspired people want to see the book face to face. >> host: what else do you have? >> guest: this is a smaller version of a shakespeare play and it is called a cord. folio means a single-sheet of paper printed on one side and then the other and the bookmaker sewed that. a cord is folded twice and you cut the edges so you can thumb through them. this is a smaller format and cheaper to produce. but half of shakespeare's plays appeared in this format before the first folio was printed. that means there are multiple edigsz editions of shakespeare's play and there difference between the cord and the folio

in the language and stage action. here we have the chronicle of the life and death of king leer and his three daughters. in the first folio the play is described as a tragedy not a history. so if you are creating this play you have to decide what it call it because there are two conflicting versions of the play. if you do hamlet, you have several cord editions and in one, the to be or not to be speech reads; to be or not to be. that is the point. it is so different than the one we recognize and that is because there are different ways of capturing the performance and perhaps that version is from a series of scribes who were

transcribing that in real-time. our collection is a picture of the entire english renaissance. we cover the introduction of print in the 1470s through the full atlantic emergence of the world including the part of the world we are in now. this is a copy of cicero but this copy happened to belong to henry viii. >> king henry the viii? >> guest: divorced beheaded survived. this copy of "cicero" is one he annotated and he said here in the early modern spelling this book is mine. just so you know. >> host: who can access this besides you, a c-span camera

crew? >> guest: you can see this online by visiting our website. if you a reader here we will put many of these documents in your hand because people need to look at the real thing. you can learn so much by looking at a digital scan but upstairs you will find them that handled a hundred books or 500 and people able to look at the paper and ink and how it is annotated gives them extra information. if you do a job interview face to face or on the telephone you would prefer face to face because there is so much pore information there. it is the same way with historic material. the more you work with them the more you get a sense of feel, touch and how things are put together. we will move around a little more. i want to show you a couple more things. let's jump here. this is a copy of what is called

the bishop's bible. this is queen elizabeth the first's bible. this is given to her my matthew parker and probably used in her chapel. so the readings during the celebrations in her chapel would have come from this book. you can see the beautiful red velvet cover. this is cleary a very expensive book. it has the tudor roses here. it has her identifying marks here: elizabeth regina saying she is the queen. and you can see on this side, this has been tectured on the fo foredge of the book. when i think about this book, peter, this is the equivalent of a cathedral in the sense it is tremendously complicated.

the amount of learning and craft you have to develop as a community to get to the point where you can create a book like this is just tremendous. and that is why it is created in this way because it is given to elizabeth and it is a monument. it is not made out of stone but it is a fabulously complicated object. you have to learn to set type, you have to learn thew handle classical languages because the sources are greek and latin, and of of that learning goes into creating this beautiful obzekje. >> host: when we see this beautiful, i want to say print, the colors are so vivid 400 years later. >> guest: this is a wonderful example of hand tinter or early colored print. this is an atlas, latin title here meaning the theater of the world or the globe, and you have

these figures here representing africa here. are, another figure here, some grisly stuff down here and probably something like the goddess wisdom on the top, or a monarch. actually that is probably the monarch. they used a copper print and someone hand colored the page itself. this edition is wonderful because the hand coloring extene extends to every plate in the edition. i would show you this one. this is europe. some known well and some isn't. you can see the cathedral.