This activity, known as commonplacing, tended to prioritise decontextualized verbal snippets over plot or character, and many books from the period are marked up with a sense of what early readers noticed. Seventeenth-century readers were encouraged to ransack their books for useful quotations, wisdom, or rhetorical flair. We know that the copy was owned by the Bruce family and sold in the early nineteenth century to the Munros, Baronets of Lindertis (the 4th Baronet was also a keen mountaineer and gave the family name to his list of Scottish mountains over 3000ft). The inscription at the bottom of one of the history plays, ‘James Graham with his hand’ also looks as if it might represent an immature reader. There are also numerous initials, some with a curly pomposity that may suggest a young person practising a grown-up signature. One seventeenth-century hand identifies ‘Ann Bruce’ written neatly in the gap around the title The Tempest – a surprising number of Shakespeare First Folios are marked by early women readers suggesting that it had a particular resonance for them (and one thing I’ve noticed is that early readers are more likely to sign their name deep in the book’s pages than on the title or preliminary pages). Firstly, there are a number of names and initials written at different points in the book, attesting to owners and readers over a couple of centuries. But the Munro copy retains some details of its own biography.

In the process, of course, evidence of previous owners and marks of their use were often destroyed. Some booksellers were experts in this kind of repair – known in the trade as ‘vampment’ – producing old books that were as good as new. It’s a testimony to the value of the book in the period.

The skill with which damaged paper has been replaced and the lines of type provided in perfect hand-inked characters is remarkable: only by holding the page up to the light can we see the join. It also has a beautifully executed ink facsimile repair to one of the margins of this play. It has replacement facsimile leaves – for the titlepage (although the portrait itself is an original) and for Ben Jonson’s famous eulogy in which he predicts that Shakespeare is ‘not of an age but for all time’, and a couple of pages at the end of the final play in the volume, Cymbeline. At the same time, booksellers worked to repair and revive copies that often showed considerable signs of wear and tear. As Darwinism chipped away at biblical authority, the Victorians invested another big old book with meaning and value, substituting the First Folio as a kind of secular scripture. Shakespeare’s high cultural status in the age of empire really transformed the First Folio into an iconic object. The Munro copy that is reproduced on this website is a fine example of this book in an early nineteenth-century rebinding. The book we now know as the First Folio is no exception, and copies carry clues, from doodles to lost pages and from inscriptions to bindings, that bear witness to the circumstances of their production and reception. Writing in books, sometimes engaging directly with their content but equally often simply using up blank paper, was standard. And standard accounts of reading in this period described it as an activity undertaken with a pen. Most books were sold unbound in order for purchasers to customise them to their own requirements. We tend to assume that the printing press produced identical copies, but in fact, early modern printing practices meant that books of the period comprised different combinations of corrected and uncorrected sheets.

William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is unique. Every copy of the book published in London at the end of 1623 as Mr.

Final folio meaning