2015 Miami Book Fair | Andrea Mays

Andrea E. Mays has degrees in economics from SUNY Binghamton and from UCLA, and teaches economics at California State University at Long Beach. The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio (Simon & Schuster), her first book, tells the miraculous and romantic story of the making of the First Folio, and of the American industrialist whose thrilling pursuit of the book became a lifelong obsession. Today it is the most valuable book in the world. Recently one sold for over five million dollars. It is the book that rescued the name of William Shakespeare and half of his plays from oblivion. The Millionaire and the Bard is a literary detective story, the tale of two mysterious men—a brilliant author and his obsessive collector—separated by space and time. It is a tale of two cities—Elizabethan and Jacobean London and Gilded Age New York. And it is the thrilling tale of the luminous book that saved the name of William Shakespeare “to the last syllable of recorded time.”

2015 Miami Book Fair