Book Review: The Millionaire and the Bard is a treasure trove for Shakespeare fans. Andrea Mays has done a brilliant job here. The first half starts slow, but the story picks up as it goes along and then sadly ends all too soon. The story of a man simultaneously growing wealthy and becoming possessed by the Bard, becoming a collectors' collector, devoting his life to his single-minded mission. Henry Folger (related to the coffee family, but gained his fortune elsewhere) spends untold dollars accumulating the world's greatest collection of Shakespeare's First Folio (the first collection of Shakespeare's complete works) and obsessively preserves it all for posterity. In The Millionaire and the Bard I learned as much about Shakespeare (Mays tells us much more than these bare bones) as I did about the millionaire, and enjoyed the tale of the hunt immensely. Shakespeare fans, I promise you will not be disappointed in The Millionaire and the Bard -- my only disappointment was that I couldn't afford to go on a quest for lost copies of the folio. Warning, if you have the collector gene, this book will bring it rabidly to life. [5 Stars]
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