The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

A standard collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, sonnets, and narrative poems, spanning comedies, histories, and tragedies written between roughly the 1590s and 1613. As a single volume, it represents the full body of work through which Shakespeare became the central figure of English literature.

Like the Burns volume in this collection, this isn't a business text — it's here because Andrew Carnegie singled it out as a formative discovery, writing in his own words: "Thenceforth there was nothing for me but Shakespeare. I seemed to be able to memorize him almost without effort. Never before had I realized what magic lay in words." For a boy with no formal schooling working as a telegraph messenger, that encounter with Shakespeare was part of the self-directed education he later credited as the real foundation of everything he built.

The specific skill Carnegie describes discovering — the power of memorable, persuasive language — is a genuinely founder-relevant one. Carnegie went on to become a prolific writer and public figure himself, coining lines like "the man who dies rich, dies disgraced" that spread far beyond their original essays; that facility with quotable, forceful prose is plausibly traceable to an autodidact's total immersion in the most quotable writer in the English language.

Shakespeare's tragedies and histories are also, at their core, studies of ambition, rivalry, hubris, and betrayal among people who depend on and eventually turn on each other — themes that map uncomfortably well onto Carnegie's own bitter falling-out with his partner Henry Clay Frick. Whether or not Carnegie drew that connection consciously, founders reading Shakespeare will recognize the same dynamics that play out in real partnerships and cofounder relationships.