Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Folger Shakespeare Library owns 82 copies of the 1623 First Folio, the largest collection of this edition in the world. Of the 235 known surviving copies, more than a third are held at the Folger.
Henry Clay Folger, a Standard Oil of New York executive, founded the library together with his wife Emily Jordan Folger. The library opened on the 23rd of April 1932, the anniversary of Shakespeare's traditional birth date, two years after Henry Folger's death.
French emigre architect Paul Philippe Cret designed the main Folger building, with Alexander B. Trowbridge serving as a consulting architect. The nine exterior relief sculptures depicting scenes from Shakespeare's plays were created by sculptor John Gregory.
The Folger holds some 60,000 manuscripts, including the earliest known staging diagram for any play in England, the only complete copy of the first quarto of Titus Andronicus (1594), thirteen letters from John Donne, and Henry VIII's childhood copy of Cicero's De officiis bearing his inscription. It also holds the papers of 18th-century actor David Garrick and the Shakespeare forgeries of William Henry Ireland.
The Teaching Shakespeare Institute is a four-week summer program for middle and high school teachers, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It began in 1984 with 50 participants; the annual cohort is now capped at 25, and by 2015 more than 775 teachers had completed the program.
The Folger Shakespeare Library reopened on the 21st of June 2024 after major renovations that ran from 2018 to 2024. The building had been closed to daytime visitors since January 2020 during that period.