Shakespeare Press

No. 4 Sheep Street was the iconic old bookshop run by two generations of the Jaggard family. Gerald Jaggard's unfinished memoir, The Life and Death of a Stratford Bookshop, reveals the story of his overpowering father, Captain William Jaggard. After Gerald's death, his son investigates the truth behind his father's emotional story. "Shakespeare Press", the completed memoir, charts his journey of discovery, uncovering his grandfather's extraordinary life, the damaging impact on the family and how Gerald survived and started a new life. "Perhaps, if bookshops can be haunted, No. 4 Sheep Street can claim more ghosts than most. Haunted certainly by my father" That was my father's opening line to his unfinished memoir discovered a few days after his death in 2002. He called it The Life and Death of a Stratford Bookshop, but it was so much more than that. Aged seventy, he had decided he must at last tell the truth about his overpowering and eccentric father, Captain William Jaggard. However it seemed he couldn't bring himself to finish his heartfelt story. It ended abruptly. And the idea began to form that I should try to discover what happened to Gerald and his family, learn why he abandoned his emotional story, and – if I could – complete his memoir. The iconic old bookshop in the heart of Stratford-upon-Avon links the two men, but the real drama concerns my grandfather's colourful and rather unbelievable life, the damaging impact on Gerald, and of how he survived and started a new life. Shakespeare Press, Gerald's completed memoir, charts our three-year journey of discovery. The entertaining and moving story of the two completely different men who ran the same Stratford bookshop, of Shakespeare 'finds' and forgeries, selling first folios to Henry Folger and the Captain's lifelong mission to prove his direct descent from Shakespeare's Printer.