Capital City Arts Initiative

Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Writing workshop, 5:30 – 7pm
Reading, 7pm
at the Carson City Library Auditorium
900 N Roop Street, Carson City

The Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] invites you to attend a reading and writing workshop Wednesday, October 17 with widely published local writer, Eric Rasmussen. The free events will take place at the Carson City Library, 900 N Roop St., Carson City Nevada. The writing workshop, “Writing Compelling Narratives: Historical and Personal,” will take place from 5:30 – 7pm followed immediately by the reading at 7pm. These events are part of CCAI’s Books & Writers series co-sponsored with the Carson City Library.

The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios, Eric Rasmussen’s latest work, is coming out in paperback this month and tells the intriguing story of the fate of the first copies of Shakespeare’s collected works published in 1623. The book’s synopsis describes the search: “The first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works, the First Folio, published in 1623, is one of the most valuable books in the world and has historically proven to be an attractive target for thieves. Of the 160 First Folios listed in a census of 1902, 14 were subsequently stolen-and only two of these were ever recovered. In his efforts to catalog all these precious First Folios, renowned Shakespeare scholar Eric Rasmussen embarked on a riveting journey around the globe, involving run-ins with heavily tattooed criminal street gangs in Tokyo, bizarre visits with eccentric, reclusive billionaires, and intense battles of wills with secretive librarians. He explores the intrigue surrounding the Earl of Pembroke, arguably Shakespeare’s boyfriend, to whom the First Folio is dedicated and whose personal copy is still missing. He investigates the uncanny sequence of events in which a wealthy East Coast couple drowned in a boating accident and the next week their First Folio appeared for sale in Kansas. We hear about Folios that were censored, the pages ripped out of them, about a volume that was marked in red paint-or is it blood? -on every page; and of yet another that has a bullet lodged in its pages. Part literary detective story, part Shakespearean lore, The Shakespeare Thefts will charm the Bard’s many fans.”

Eric Rasmussen is a professor and chair of the University of Nevada Reno’s English Department. His other publications include The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue; Mankind and Everyman, and The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare published in 2007. In 2011, he received the Nevada Regents’ Teaching Award from the Nevada System of Higher Education and Board of Regents. Each summer, he leads group trips from Reno to Ashland, Oregon, for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He also holds annual workshops on teaching Shakespeare for Reno High School teachers. He earned his Ph.D. in English in 1990 at the University of Chicago.

CCAI and the Library invite all writers and readers to attend Dr. Rasmussen’s workshop and reading. This project was funded, in part, by a Nevada Arts Council Artist Residency Express Grant.