February 13, 2002
Continuing the Shakespeare discussion from Monday, today I came across Michael Dobson's interesting book review "Folio Freaks: the Fetishisation of Shakespeare's First Folio" in the Guardian. Among the interesting tidbits is that there are many varieties of the First Folio, as the cash-strapped publishers made corrections continuously during the printing but didn't want to waste the error-filled pages, John Milton's first-published work was a sonnet featured in the Second Folio, and a copy of the First Folio owned by John Dryden's niece recently sold for over six million dollars.
Dobson's skepticism regarding the skyrocketing value of the First Folio (as he writes, it "has a use value, for most normal purposes, inferior to almost any other extant collected edition of Shakespeare" and if one wants "a readable text of Shakespeare, as full and accurate as all the early editions reasonably permit, you would be far better advised to invest in a paperback copy of the Oxford edition") shows that he never collected comic books or baseball cards; any collector knows that there is nothing more irresistible than a first appearance or rookie card, which the F1 essentially is.
Dobson's skepticism regarding the skyrocketing value of the First Folio (as he writes, it "has a use value, for most normal purposes, inferior to almost any other extant collected edition of Shakespeare" and if one wants "a readable text of Shakespeare, as full and accurate as all the early editions reasonably permit, you would be far better advised to invest in a paperback copy of the Oxford edition") shows that he never collected comic books or baseball cards; any collector knows that there is nothing more irresistible than a first appearance or rookie card, which the F1 essentially is.
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