I’m not sure I’m ready to call book collecting pathological, especially in view of the fact that I’m a book collector myself, but, after reading the story of Henry Folger, I may be swayed. You have to have doubts about anyone who devotes his entire life to collecting as many copies of a single book as Folger did.

Of course, as Folger (or his wife, Emily, who was as devoted to the chase as her husband) would have been the first to tell you, he was not collecting multiple copies of the same book. In her intermittently engaging The Millionaire and the Bard, Andrea Mays makes plain that every surviving copy of William Shakespeare’s great First Folio edition was in fact unique, characterised variously by missing pages (or whole plays), bound-in proof sheets, altered