Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée

Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée

Lesser, Zachary

Hardcover

Series: Published in Cooperation with the Folger Shakespeare Library

Literary CriticismShakespeare

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0812252942
ISBN13: 9780812252941
Publisher: Univ Of Pennsylvania Pr
Published: May 28 2021
Pages: 208
Weight: 1.25
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a collected works of William Shakespeare, not in an imposingly large format but as a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. For mysterious reasons, perhaps involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's Men, the project ran into trouble. In an attempt to salvage it, information on the title pages of some of the playbooks was falsified, making them resemble leftover copies of earlier editions. The deception worked for nearly three hundred years, until it was unmasked by scholars in the early twentieth century. The discovery of these Pavier Quartos, as they became known, was a landmark success for the New Bibliography and played an important role in establishing the validity and authority of that method of analysis. While more recent scholars have reassessed the traditional narrative that the New Bibliographers wrote, no one has gone back to look at the primary evidence: the quartos themselves.

In Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes Zachary Lesser undertakes a completely fresh study of these playbooks. Through an intensive bibliographical analysis of over three hundred surviving quartos, Lesser reveals evidence that has gone entirely unseen before: ghosts (faint, oily impressions produced when one book is bound next to another); holes (the tiny remains of the first simple stitching that held pamphlets together); and rips and scrapes (post-production alterations of title pages). This new evidence--much of it visible only with the aid of enhanced photographic methods--suggests that the Pavier Quartos are far more mysterious, with far more consequential ramifications for book history and Shakespeare scholarship than we have thought.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All