Andrea Mays, lecturer in economics at California State University, Long Branch, and author of The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger's Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio, will be the next speaker in the Shakespeare Lecture Series at the University of Delaware Library.

Her talk will begin at 4:30 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 3, in the Class of 1941 Lecture Room of the Hugh M. Morris Library, 181 South College Ave.

Those planning to attend are encouraged to RSVP via email at rsvp-library@winsor.lib.udel.edu. Walk-ins are welcome. Light refreshments will be available.

Recently a copy of the First Folio sold for more than $5 million. Shakespeare’s business partners, companions and fellow actors who initially published the First Folio could not have known that it would become one of the most important books ever published in the English language or that it would become a fetish object for collectors.

In her talk, Mays will describe the miraculous and romantic stories of the making of the First Folio and of Henry Clay Folger’s pursuit of the book. Her literary detective story connects the tales of two mysterious men — a brilliant author and his obsessive collector — separated by space and time. It is an exploration of two cities — Elizabethan and Jacobean London and Gilded Age New York, and a chronicle of two worlds —art and commerce — that unfolded an ocean and three centuries apart.

Like her subject Henry Folger, Mayes has had a lifelong obsession with Shakespeare and his times. She spent much of her Manhattan girlhood holed up in the New York Public Library listening to vinyl LP recordings of performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

She holds degrees in economics from the State University of New York at Binghamton and from UCLA. She was a presidential appointee to the U.S. International Trade Commission, where she served as economist to the chairman. She divides her time between California and Washington, D.C.  

The Nov. 3 talk is part of a celebration of Shakespeare that also include an exhibition celebrating the Bard. For a full list of events, click here.

The programs and exhibitions are sponsored by University Museums and the University of Delaware Library, with support from the Delaware Humanities Forum, the Special Collections Projects and Planning Committee of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Charlotte Orth Shakespeare Fund of the Department of English, and the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library.