Mark Twain

Is Shakespeare Dead? Mark Twain

A dispatch from the desk of The Ghost of Mark Twain: Seven years after William Shakespeare died, a few of his actor friends put together a folio of his plays for posterity. No original manuscripts exist, so the surviving 232 first folios are some of the rarest and most-treasured books of literature in existence. One sold at Sotheby's in 2006 for $5.2 million. Now make that 233, as a well-preserved folio was discovered [late last year] in a small library in the north of France. And who did the French literati call to authenticate their find? They called one of the foremost Shakespeare scholars in America, Eric Rasmussen, head of the English Department at University of Nevada, Reno. Dr. Rasmussen flew to France, examined the folio and gave it a thumbs up. Voila!