![]() Because his engraved bookplate, dated 1704, is on the front pastedown (inside front cover), it seems likely that the dark, blind-tooled “Cambridge-style” binding, characteristically late 17th- or early 18th-century, was made for him. The first owner we can identify as such was Sir Fulwar Skipwith (1676-1728), 2nd in the baronetcy of Skipwith of Newbold Hall (Warwickshire). Extra leaves inserted between the front cover and the text include a virtual scrapbook of owners’ marks, notes, and a few souvenirs. It also displays a fair number of surgical scars - torn corners and edges rather amateurishly repaired at various times, partly using what look like adhesive stickers, with the bits of missing text restored in pen-facsimile (hand written in imitation of type). Its known provenance (history of ownership) is accordingly more complicated than that of the JCB copy. The John Hay Library copy wears its past much more obviously. Here the modern form of reverence - or at least of high valuation - is observed, not in the effacement of quirks and blemishes but in the minutest possible account of them. ![]() The authors’ purpose is to provide the equivalent of a set of fingerprints for every copy, so that even a copy that has been stolen and had its more obvious identifying marks removed can be positively identified by anyone with basic knowledge of the physical composition of printed books. Painstaking description is given under such categories as condition, manuscript annotations, repairs and damage affecting text, repairs and damage not affecting text (which include such things as comparative stiffness and variant margins of individual leaves), along with complete registers of press variants and of the occurrence of every one of the various watermarks. The latter, “an odd quirk of this volume,” and many, many other details are noted in Eric Rasmussen and Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue (2012), in which the John Carter Brown and John Hay Library copies are nos. Read aloud from it, and it breathes again - but don’t breathe on it!Ī couple of details: This copy has the engraved portrait in its earliest state (no shadow on Shakespeare’s collar) also Troilus and Cressida is placed incorrectly after Timon of Athens and before Julius Caesar. ![]() One of the very rare complete and original copies, this book, which cannot have been read too hard at any time, whether out of reverence or benign neglect, remains an invaluable witness among its fellow witnesses to many works which would otherwise have been lost in all but their titles, gone the way of Love’s Labours Won. All that has been added, on the fine vellum front free endleaf, is the signature “Sophia Augusta Brown.” It has, in effect, been embalmed and well made up, more for reverential viewing than for reading. Every trace of its pre-1860 history, if traces there were, has been erased by Turner’s binder, Francis Bedford, whose elaborately blocked and tooled leather covers enclose a printed text that has been disassembled, washed and pressed, and put back together better than it looked alive. It is, in its outward aspect, an utterly nineteenth-century book in an antique style. John Carter Brown bought this copy of the First Folio in 1879, we know, or are told at least, that the previous owner, Robert Samuel Turner (1818-1887), had acquired it “about twenty years ago” (about 1860) in a “seventeenth-century binding.” William Younger Fletcher, in his English Book Collectors, published in 1902, described the Turner copy as “one of the finest copies in existence of the first folio,” which Turner “sold privately to an American collector.” When Turner acquired the book the text leaves were almost certainly complete and minimally damaged: Donald Farren, who cataloged all 80 or so of the Folger Shakespeare Library copies in the early 1990’s, noted in personal correspondence that the JCB copy is “virtually unrepaired.” The upshot is that this may actually have been a much better copy before Turner had it re-bound, judged by present-day standards by which we tend to prefer a physical book that is more like an undisturbed archeological site than a skilled reconstruction from original materials. ![]()
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