Bill Lloyd is a long-time Olsson's buyer and manager, having helped both to open and to close our late great Bethesda store. When not keeping Olsson's remainder tables supplied with bargains, he studies Early Modern Theatre History. He did not write the plays of Shakespeare.

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Well, I’ve just flown back from San Diego (and boy are my arms tired!) where I attended the 35th annual conference of the Shakespeare Association of America. There were plenty of seminars, and paper sessions galore, but probably the most popular meeting place was the Book Exhibit Room where various publishers with Shake-stuff to vend displayed their latest wares...

Two notable items were to be found at the Random House table. One was Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story by Stanley Wells. Professor Wells (a charming man with a white beard), one of the most distinguished of living Shakespeare scholars, the author of numerous books in the field, and the General Editor of the prestigious Oxford Shakespeare, was there signing copies of his latest book. It’s a fascinating look at how Shakespeare, so far from being a lonely genius on the mountain-top, was a working man of the theatre, intimately involved on a daily basis with his fellow actors and writers in the burgeoning entertainment industry of his day. Shakespeare and Co. is just the right mix of serious scholarship, interesting anecdotes, and popular appeal. I’m reading it right now...

The other star of the Random House table was the new Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare edited by the English critic Jonathan Bate and the American textual scholar Eric Rasmussen. Each collected edition of Shakespeare varies somewhat from every other edition, and the RSC Shakespeare is no different. The editors and publisher trumpet its return to the First Folio of 1623 for the base texts of the 36 core plays of the Shakespeare Canon, rejecting the idea of "conflated texts" made by combining readings from both the Quartos and the Folio. The RSC does use the Quartos to correct errors and prints omitted Quarto passages in appendices. In addition to the Folio plays this handsome volume includes the collaborations Pericles (by Shakespeare and George Wilkins) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (by Shakespeare and John Fletcher), as well as Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. No edition of Shakespeare would be complete nowadays without its controversial decision and the RSC Shakespeare comes through by omitting the poem A Lover’s Complaint, accepting Brian Vickers’ arguments in Shakespeare, ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ and John Davies of Hereford' that Davies not Shakespeare was its author and that it was printed at the end of the Sonnets in error. MacDonald Jackson will have something to say about that!

One of the best features of these two books is that Olsson’s will be offering them at 15% off during our Shakespeare in Washington Celebration Sale from April 23 (you-know-who’s birthday) through May 24. Every book in our Shakespeare section, as well as selected other books, CDs, DVDs and sidelines will be featured at discounted prices during that time. Next week, I’ll be back to tell you about some of the other Shakespeare books we’ll have on sale.