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The First Folio of Shakespeare, Norton Facsimile Charlton Hinman 1st Edition Book Oct 1968 The Norton Facsimile. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Prepared by Charlton Hinman. Accurate, full-size photographic facsimile, 100 percent rag paper, genuine half morocco, stamped in gold, gilt top, silk ribbon etc. Beautiful oversized work, 10.25" x 14.25". 1968, 1st Edition. Unique addition to any library. Charlton Hinman's facsimile of Shakespeare's First Folio was a colossal achievement when it was first published in 1968 HUGE BOOK Approx 13LBS Size: 10.25 x 14.25 inches (26 x 36.5 cms) Hardback. 928 printed pages Excellent Nearly New Condition. The book itself is in excellent shape with only minor wear as shown in the photos to the top and bottom edge of the binding. The slip case has done its job WELL protecting the book. It has staining and damage as shown in the photos but all edges and sides are still holding together well.

SEE BELOW FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTION AS WELL AS THE LOOSE SHEET INCLUDED IN THE BOOK AS PICTURED.

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The present facsimile could not have been made without the use of the magnificent collection of First Folios in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington nor without the aid and cooperation of the Folger staff. Both were generously provided, and to the Director and his colleagues I wish to express my gratitude once more-for this is not the first time I have been deeply in their debt. And again I owe special thanks to the Curator, Dr. Giles Dawson. Without his help my own task would have been immeasurably more difficult and have taken much longer to complete; his many good offices went far beyond anything that might have been hoped, except perhaps from such a friend. Yet to Professor Fredson Bowers, another friend of long standing, I also owe particular thanks. His counsel when the work was being planned and his subsequent criticism of the Introduction have alike been invaluable to me. It is to the late Sir Walter Greg, however, that my Introduction owes most.

Sir Walter's last great work was in fact originally planned as an introduction to a new facsimile of the Folio. The facsimile was not produced, but in The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford, 1955) Greg provided much more than the introductory essay it was meant to contain. For he here gave us the most comprehensive and illuminating survey that had yet been written, not merely of how the Folio came into being, but of the editorial problems that must be faced by all who work critically with Shakespeare's text and of the solutions that had been reached up to about 1950. As Greg was himself our greatest authority on the dramatic manuscripts of Shakespeare's time, it is not surprising that he here addressed himself to one main question above all others: the nature of the "copy" from which the various Folio plays were printed.

His account of the printing itself was less valuable and has since been rendered more or less obsolete by the discovery of large bodies of evidence not known at the time he wrote; but what he had to say about the kinds of manuscripts reproduced in the substantive editions of Shakespeare's plays is not likely to be superseded. The observations about copy in the first section of the present Introduction, therefore, although they take notice of such modifications of Greg's views as have recently received serious consideration, are based in considerable measure on his work. And if I have not attempted to describe the evidence behind some of my statements about the copy used for individual Folio texts

—what warrant there is for declaring this play printed from Shakespeare's own manuscript, for example, and that from a prompt-book—the reason is simply that a most satisfactory treatment of these matters is readily available in The Shakespeare First Folio, to which I am happy to invite the attention of the interested reader. Shakespearian scholars will of course already be aware that no one can write responsibly about Shakespeare's text without some familiarity with Greg's work; yet I should like here to acknowledge both my debt to it and my sense of obligation to the labors of many others who, under his leadership, have added to our knowledge of Shakespeare's text. For ours is a community effort to which all who try can at least hope, as I do now, to contribute something that will be useful to us all.

CHARLTON HINMAN

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CHARLTON HINMAN

Here is one of the essential books of our heritage in a beautiful and permanent form.

The justly famous First Folio of Shakespeare, which preserved for us the work of the greatest writer the world has seen, is now reproduced in an accurate, full-size photographic facsimile that is at the same time an outstanding example of fine bookmaking.

The Norton Facsimile is printed on 100 per cent rag paper that is, as befits the work, as nearly time-proot as can be devised. It is bound in genuine imported half mo-rocco, stamped in genuine gold, with genuine gilt top. It has a two-color title page and a silk place-marking ribbon.

To photograph the originals, a half-ton camera was moved into the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the publisher paid the salary of a Folger staff member who was present during the photographing. Though in no sense a Folger publication, The Norton Facsimile could not have been produced without Folger cooperation.

Yet the physical aspects of The Norton Facsimile are by no means the most interesting. In 1955, in the course of a review of an earlier facsimile, the London limes Literary Supplement said: "Professor Hinman has been, with the aid of an ingenious machine, collating all the eighty-odd copies in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington and studying the variations between the copies with the intention of producing a facsimile not of a Folio but the Folio."

The background of the LS comment is this: no two copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare are identical. The book was printed, two pages at a time, on a small slow-speed press over a period of nearly two years. Proof was read and corrections were made as the printing proceeded.

The uncorrected sheets were not thrown out but were mixed in with the corrected ones, with the result that no extant Folio shows the finally corrected state of every page, and no two Folios are identical.

The discovery of the variant readings produced by this method of working, and hence the hally corrected state of the entire Folio text, has been an urgent objective of scholars: and it was to this end that Henry Clay Folger and Emily Jordan Folger, his wite, collected eighty of the approximately two hundred thirty surviving Folios. Yet the task of collating the Folger copies proved insuperable until Professor Charlton Hinman invented the Hinman Collator, the "ingenious machine" referred to by the TIS, which has made possible a whole new era of scientific textual scholarship.

By superimposing the images of apparently identical pages, the Himan Collator at once reveals whatever dif_ ferences there are and thus assists scholars in establishing an accurate text. This method is both immeasurably more rapid and immeasurably more accurate than the attempt to compare pages by looking first at one, then at the other.

A full report of Professor Hinman's discoveries and conclusions is to be found in his now-classic study, The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (2 vols., Oxford, 1963):

The Norton Facsimile is the long-awaited work—"a facsimile not of a Folio but the Folio." It shows the finally corrected state of every page; and where, as is usually the case, the Folger collection has many examples of the final state, The Norton Facsimile shows the clearest and clean-est. The pages used were selected by Protessor Hinman, after a careful examination of the entire Folger collection, from the twenty-nine most satisfactory copies, the best two providing only about one hundred eighty pages each.

No filters were used in the photography, and no touching up or "opaquing" of any kind was done. The selected pages are reproduced exactly as they are, and any blemish present in the original of a given page is faithfully represented in the facsimile. But such pains were taken in the preliminary selection that it was never necessary to reproduce a seriously imperfect page, or one that is not eminently clear and readable throughout. The reproductions are in half-tone and the same size as the original.

A feature of The Norton Facsimile that will make it a boon to scholars is its line numbering. Surprising as it may seem, there have not hitherto been standard line numbers tor Shakespeare, except that it has been more or less customary to use the act-scene-line numbers of the old Globe edition of 1864 for reference to particular words or pas-sages. Reference by this means has three serious disadvan-tages: (1) the act-scene divisions, now being discarded by many editors, are mainly an invention of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors and are for the most part without basis in the Elizabethan editions they are supposed to represent; hence (2) they often give a misleading impression of how the plays were originally staged, indeed of Shakespeare's craftsmanship as a dramatist; and (3) the system is based on a "modernized" text of the nineteenth century which, because of its editorial and typographical peculiarities, differs so much from all other editions that what is line 200, say, in the Globe may be line 176 or 218 in another edition, discrepancies of twenty lines or more being frequent. The First Folio, the best and often the only real authority for most of the plays, provides the one text that can be universally accepted as a permanent standard, given only the general availability of a reliable facsimile in which the lines are numbered. The line numbering in The Norton Facsimile was done by Professor Hinman after consultation with the leading scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. As a convenience The Norton Facsimile also gives, at the foot of each page, the Globe act-scene-line numbers for the first and last lines of the page. The first edition of the Globe is used.

Besides selecting the pages to be used and supervising the photographing, Protessor Hinman has written an introduction in which he discusses the value and "authority" of the Folio version of each of the plays and explains the principles and problems involved both in the printing of the original Folio and in the preparation of The Norton Facsimile. He has also prepared a fascinating appendix that shows the before-and-after states of representative pages and, in some ways the most remarkable of all, two original proof sheets with the original proofreader's marks that have almost miraculously survived.

The Norton Facsimile is without question superior to any Folio facsimile hitherto produced. It is even closer to the original publisher's intention than any extant original Folio, and it is as a whole better and more clearly printed than any extant original Folio. It makes available everywhere what until now could be studied in detail only in the Folger Shakespeare Library (no other library in the world has more than six copies). It offers to book lovers, at a moderate price, a volume more pleasing to the hand and eye than originals that have been sold for $90,000 or more.

Professor Hinman is editor of the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles (Oxford), member of the Variorum Shakespeare Committee of the Modern Language Association, chairman of the Shakespeare Section of the MLA, and Professor of English in the University of Kansas.