Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies

Each of the 235 surviving copies of the First Folio is unique. The differences are a result of the printing process—typographical errors were discovered, and corrections made, while the book was going through the hand-press. As a result, there were numerous interruptions, alterations, irregularities, and inconsistencies. The Shakespearean scholar Emma Smith points out that “we tend to think that the printing press creates hundreds of identical printed books, but that is not actually the case in the hand-press period . . . what we have is scores of different texts, different Folios. Each copy is a unique collation.” Shown here is a minor error in the pagination within the running header of the final two pages of King Lear. The verso (left) page is numbered “38” while the facing recto (right) is numbered correctly in sequence “309.” It is likely that the printer’s inexperienced apprentice compositor, John Leason, neglected to insert the missing zero in the “38.”