He recently received the A Bertram Chandler Award for lifetime achievement in Australian science fiction.

Paul has been short-listed for many awards and won the Aurealis, William Atheling and the inaugural Peter McNamara awards. He is also the publisher at Ford Street Publishing. Finally, Collins speculates on Shakespeare’s cross-cultural future as Asian buyers enter their Folios into the electronic ether, and recounts the book’s remarkable journey as it is found in attics, gets lost in oceans and fires, is bought and sold, and ultimately becomes immortal. Paul has been short-listed for many awards and won the Aurealis, William Atheling and the inaugural Peter McNamara awards. The Beckoning is Paul’s first adult novel. Paul Collins, lover of odd books and author of the national bestseller Sixpence House, takes up the strange quest for this white whale of precious books.īroken down into five acts, each tied to a different location and century, The Book of William’s travelogue follows the trail of the Folio’s curious rise: a dizzying Sotheby’s auction on a pristine copy preserved since the seventeenth century, the Fleet Street machinations of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth-century quests for lost Folios, obsessive acquisitions by twentieth-century oilmen, and the high-tech hoards of twenty-first-century Japan.

The book: William Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623. One book above all others has transfixed connoisseurs for four centuries-a book sold for shillings in the streets of London, whisked to Manhattan for millions, and stored deep within the vaults of Tokyo. The first popular narrative history of Shakespeare’s First Folio, the world’s most obsessively pursued book

The Book of William by Paul Collins