(There are 82 in the Folger Library alone.) Many early books survive in only one or two copies, and we know of many others that were definitely published but of which no copies can be found. There are, relatively, a lot of them around. But it is not really a particularly rare book. The Shakespeare Folio is a cultural treasure. It is undeniably an impressive book, with 36 plays printed on over 900 double-columned pages, an engraved portrait of Shakespeare, a dedication to two influential aristocrats, along with other prefatory materials, all attesting to the ambition of the publishers to create a living monument to Shakespeare. Eventually, they would secure the rights to publish the 19 plays that had already appeared in print (though Pericles, which had been published in 1609 and whose rights they owned, was inexplicably left out), and they would establish their rights to publish the 18 plays that had not yet been published and belonged to The King’s Men, the acting company for which they were written. (For a “quarto,” each sheet of paper was folded twice, to produce eight smaller pages, and then gathered.)īut, in 1621, five years after Shakespeare’s death, a group of publishers began the project of printing a collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Previously, 19 of his plays had appeared in small, individual volumes, almost all published in “quarto” formats. (“Folio” is the bibliographic term for a book made from gatherings of sheets of paper, each folded once along the longer side to make two leaves-or four pages.) The First Folio is merely the first appearance of Shakespeare’s plays in a folio format, and it is a mark of Shakespeare’s extraordinary prestige that the volume of his collected plays could claim the word “folio” as its own. The First Folio was not, of course, the first book printed in a folio format. Indeed, there might never have been a First Folio at all. But it was not always so easy to imagine the First Folio going on a grand tour-or its charred fragments lovingly preserved. This is a wonderful testimony to the astonishing holdings (and generosity) of the Folger and to the remarkable interest there is in Shakespeare. To mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is sending 18 of its extraordinary collection of First Folios on tour, enabling all fifty states to put a First Folio on public display at some point in 2016. Edwin Forrest Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts University of Pennsylvaniaĭepending, then, on what you mean by the word “surviving,” Forrest’s folio is one of about 230 surviving copies of what is, to any book lover, among the most precious of early printed books.
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