Does anyone know if the @britishlibrary.bsky.social ever plans to restore the Shakespeare in Quarto site or to make the underlying digital facsimiles accessible? The Oxford Shakeespeare Quartos Archive (which had copies) is also defunct. Are those facsimiles accessible somehow?
@richove.bsky.social
And we’re back! We’ve spent some time debugging and I think everything is working as expected , but please let us know if you see anything that’s not working right. Thanks for your patience!
SEPTA's old slogan: "We're Getting There."
We're getting there, everyone. Hopefully the site will be back up next week for some testing, and then live for the world the following week. Thanks for your patience.
If any publisher out there wants to print a version of the Census (as of 2026), let me know. Books > websites for durability.
We are making progress on restoring the site to regular functionality. More soon. Hopefully it will be working as normal in the near future
Quick update: the site is back up at its usual URL: shakespearecensus.org
But still in a flattened archival version without full functionality. We're continuing to work on getting the pop-up windows with copy details back up, as well as other functions, even in this temporary version of the site.
Unfortunately the details of each copy are not available because the pop-up window is not currently functional on this static site. The list of copies is there, but we are working on getting details visible as well.
For now you can see all the copies here:
shakespeare-census-static-qttm7.ondigitalocean.app/homepage
The site is currently down due to an “attempted malicious attack.” We should have a version of the site up soon but it may lack search functionality. We’re working on a full solution asap
Yes, although it's not quite apples-to-apples because in fact those 229 surely include leaves from many more copies than that. We could easily have parts of 400 copies in those 229.
This puts the current count of First Folios in the Census at 229!
In 1959, it was on loan to Lehigh, and Frank Hook discussed it in PBSA 53: 334-8. Honeyman's books ultimately went to Sotheby's. The F1 disappeared.
The copy is now in private hands but it resurfaced when it was exhibited at Christie's in May 2023:
www.christies.com/en/events/sh...
This F1 was owned in the 17th century by a Cheshire gentleman and lawyer Randall Brereton.
In 1934, it was acquired from "one of the oldest titled families in England" by the NY dealer Gabriel Wells. He sold it to Robert Honeyman, an engineer, collector, and Lehigh U alum.
📣📢📣We've just added a First Folio (SC 5381). The "Honeyman copy" is listed as untraced in both West and Rasmussen & West, but it is now confirmed. It has interesting MS corrections and references to (nonexistent??) quartos of 2H4 (1639) and R3 (1624).
shakespearecensus.org/sc/5381/