In 1932, the Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on Shakespeare’s birthday with President Herbert Hoover and Robert Frost in attendance. The Library would house the world's largest collection of Shakespeare First Folios, and and hundreds of thousands of volumes gathered across the centuries.
"In almost unbelievable fullness and richness, we assembled books, pamphlets, documents, manuscripts, relics, curios," James Quincy Adams Jr, its first director, wrote. "The library is thus more than a mere library; it is also a museum of the Golden Age of Elizabeth, and a memorial to the influence that Shakespeare has exerted upon the world's culture."
These days, the Folger Shakespeare Library has a new mission. And it isn’t Shakespeare.
