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Published in 1623, the 750 copies of the first edition of William Shakespeare’s collected works, known as the First Folio, has been sought after relentlessly by kings, earls, and bibliophiles. In his effort to track down the extant 232 copies renowned Shakespeare scholar Eric Rasmussen and his team of First Folio hunters embarked on an incredible adventure around the world. This fast-paced narrative takes us from the court rooms of England to high-security vaults in the rare book rooms of Japan, encountering thieves, reclusive librarians, and eccentric billionaires along the way, all lusting for one of the world’s most valuable books. This fascinating account explores how manuscript hunters identify a book's past through distinguishing marks: a bullet hole, desecrated pages, and splashes of red that resemble blood; and how a book’s location and condition can reveal its story. Part literary detective story, part Shakespearean lore, The Shakespeare Thefts is a rare glimpse between the covers of one of the most coveted books in the world.
A Shakespeare authority recounts his attempts to identify and document all extant copies of Shakespeare's First Folio of 1623.
Rasmussen (English/Univ. of Nevada) begins by reminding us of the rarity of the First Folio (232 known copies), of its immense cultural significance (without it, half the plays of the Bard would no longer exist—including The TempestandTwelfth Night) and of its physical aspects (its size, its £1 cost in 1623). The author then devotes some chapters to stories about the provenance of various copies—especially those with complicated, even violent histories. These chapters, distributed throughout, are interrupted occasionally with other segments—e.g., Rasmussen's discovery in 2005 of a painting he believed/hoped was a portrait of Shakespeare (it wasn't) and his story about an employee of Isaac Jaggard, printer of the First Folio, who left a hair stuck to the wet ink in one copy. The author also provides a terrific appendix, which readers should not skip, that tells how Elizabethans printed books and how the First Folio came to be. We learn, too, how Rasmussen assembled his team of Folio specialists and inspectors and how they created their massive census of the extant copies. He grieves about an inaccessible copy in the hands of a Japanese multimillionaire, and he tells how he once—during a bomb scare—walked out of a library with one of only two known copies of the 1603Hamlet. The author also tells numerous tales of thefts and attempted thefts. Sometimes, Rasmussen affects a patronizing, just-plain-folks diction, and probably employs more exclamation points than in all of his scholarly writing combined!
Indiana Jones, sans bullwhip, pursues the Bard.
Overview
Published in 1623, the 750 copies of the first edition of William Shakespeare’s collected works, known as the First Folio, has been sought after relentlessly by kings, earls, and bibliophiles. In his effort to track down the extant 232 copies renowned Shakespeare scholar Eric Rasmussen and his team of First Folio hunters embarked on an incredible adventure around the world. This fast-paced narrative takes us from the court rooms of England to high-security vaults in the rare book rooms of Japan, encountering thieves, reclusive librarians, and eccentric billionaires along the way, all lusting for one of the world’s most valuable books. This fascinating account explores how manuscript ...