Early 17th-century printing being what it was – semi-literate typesetters referring to handwritten pages while manually placing every letter – each page was being edited even as it was being printed, and punctuation, spelling, and even entire lines can vary from copy to copy. Without this book, most of Shakespeare’s works, including some of his best-loved works, wouldn’t have survived. Seven years after Shakespeare died, his surviving business partners, John Heminge and Henry Condell, collected almost every play he wrote into a single volume called a folio. The subject could be as dry as dust, but in Paul Collins’s hands, the folios’ stories come to life. Scholars study and analyze past owners’ doodles in the margins, and some specialize in examining the stress on the type to determine in which order the page was printed.
Shakespeare’s First Folio: no printed book has had each copy so obsessively cataloged, studied, and coveted.
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