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

"This book is an extended case study of one of the most important books in the history of Shakespeare studies-the 1619 Quartos (also known as the Pavier Quartos). Not the First Folio, which has been analyzed more intensely and celebrated more devotionally than any other book printed in early modern England. Rather, it was an ordinary-looking quarto volume that bound together ten plays, or nine playbooks (since one of them is made up of two plays), all in some way connected to Shakespeare. Three of these plays are linked by continuous signatures, the printer's pagination system: The Whole Contention betweene the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke (which comprises versions of the first and second parts of Henry VI) and Pericles. All the other plays in the group have their own run of signatures: A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. While Yorkshire Tragedy and Oldcastle are not now considered Shakespearean, they both have Shakespeare's name on the title page, although Henry V, like all the other early quartos of that play, does not"--
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.
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 as a series of quarto pamphlets. Zachary Lesser examines more than three hundred surviving copies of these "Pavier Quartos," revealing they are far more mysterious than we thought.