Share
Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Duree (in English)
Zachary Lesser
(Author)
·
University of Pennsylvania Press
· Hardcover
Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Duree (in English) - Lesser, Zachary
$ 47.25
$ 59.85
You save: $ 12.60
Choose the list to add your product or create one New List
✓ Product added successfully to the Wishlist.
Go to My WishlistsIt will be shipped from our warehouse between
Tuesday, May 28 and
Thursday, May 30.
You will receive it anywhere in United States between 1 and 3 business days after shipment.
Synopsis "Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Duree (in 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.
