from the jacket: "Paul Collins's Banvard's Folly is a different kind of book. Here are 13 unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skulduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck - or perhaps some combination of them all - leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among them are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers from across the centuries and around the world..."
- I especially enjoyed learning about William Henry Ireland who signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short, but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the bard - until he pushed his luck too far.

Whenever I think of doing something grand and new, I remember this book and go back to drinking beer and adding things to my Good Reads list. Kidding, kidding. That's just what I'm doing right now.

At least they tried.

What a strange and wonderful book. Each chapter is one person's story of a) extreme success, b) extreme failure, c) something in between, or d) all of the above.

It could be depressing, and at times it is, but mostly it stands testament to our ability to try and to invent and to create and to persevere.

Funny, enlightening, and highly recommended.

History is written by the winners. Or at least about the winners. There’s no shortage of tributes to, say, Shakespeare or Einstein. But what about the losers? Happily, there’s Paul Collins—a great and, I think, under-appreciated writer—who in Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World, brings to life a group of people who were famous in their own day, but for various reasons have been completely forgotten. The best-known (if that’s the right word) of Collins’ anti-heroes is Delia Bacon, who was renowned on two continents for her brilliantly erudite lectures, but went mad, and in the process invented the Francis Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare’s-plays theory. (She and Francis were unrelated, though late in her life she seems to have forgotten this.) Martin Farquhar Tupper was a famous writer of revoltingly treacly Victorian poetry, strangely much admired by Walt Whitman. René Blondlot was a brilliant scientist who believed that he had discovered N-rays. Collins manages to evoke sympathy for his hapless protagonists, though it’s perhaps not unmixed with schadenfreude. Still, in this deeply fun book, they finally have the last word.

Once the world's most famous painter, John Banvard died penniless - why? The stories of forgotten people read by Andrew Sachs.