 Hello, we'll give everyone a few minutes to join and we will start the webinar very shortly. Good afternoon. I'm Keith Webster, the Helen and Henry Posner Jr. Dean of University Libraries and your host for this event, featuring Dr. Sam Landlay, the Special Collections Curator at Carnegie Mellon's University Libraries. Let me begin by thanking you all for being with us. I know that we have a number of trustees, members of the University Leadership Team, members of my Dean's Advocacy Council with us today. I'm grateful to you and everyone for taking the time out of your schedules to learn more about Shakespeare. 2023 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's first folio. And this webinar starts a year of celebrations for all of us at Carnegie Mellon. The folio, properly titled Mr. William Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies, was printed in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. And we are very proud to hold a copy of the first folio in our Special Collections, one of only 230 globally that remain in existence. That first folio is joined in our collections by two copies each of the second, third and fourth folios. And you'll hear a lot more about these rare documents in today's program. Our folios are held by our Department of Special Collections, our repository for rare books, manuscripts and early scientific instruments and pre-digital calculating and computational machines. The copies are in our collections thanks to the generosity of donors past and present. Charles J. Rosenblum gave us both the first and one of each of the second, third and fourth folios. And we have copies of the second, third and fourth folio in the Posner Foundation's Posner Collection. And we are very grateful to those and to everyone who supports the work of our Special Collections department. In my acknowledgments, I also want to thank my colleagues, Sarah Bender, Sonja Wellington, and Morgan Wahlbert, and everyone in the External Relations team for helping us pull this together. And of course to Sam, who I will thank again at the end for giving his time and expertise in pulling this event together. Sam joined us about two weeks before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and had the unenviable task of moving into a very hands-on job at a time when libraries were closed. Sam came to us from the University of Virginia where he did a PhD in English Literature, and he also holds a master's in library information science with the certificate of concentration in rare book and Special Collections librarianship. Sam has become something of an internet sensation at least in the rare books world with his YouTube presentations, and these are available on the CMU library's YouTube page. I especially encourage you to view Fine and Rare One, the equivalent event to today's that we held last year, where Sam gave a general overview of some of the treasures from our collections. I'm delighted to welcome Sam, who will say much more about Shakespeare and his folios. I'll come back later to have a discussion with Sam and to share your questions with him. So please think about questions, comments, feedback, drop those into chat, and we'll try to get to as many of those as time permits. So with that, over to you, Sam. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Sam Lemley. I'm the curator of Special Collections in Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, and welcome to the second episode of Fine and Rare, which is a series in which I share some of the many treasures that are held in the collection here. So the last episode, I gave you a sort of overview of the many things that we have in the collection in different subject areas and different disciplines. But today, this time, we're going to do something a little bit different in that we're going to focus exclusively on the seven books that you see here. So these are all copies of Shakespeare's folio, and I'll get into what that means in the later segment. But it's significant that CMU has a copy of the first folio, which is the first time that all of Shakespeare's plays have been gathered into print in one volume. That's amazing in itself. There are only 228 copies that survive, and we have one here. But we also have two copies of the second folio. That's here. Two copies of the third folio here, and two copies of the fourth folio. So the second copy, and I'll repeat these dates in a minute, but the second folio is printed in 1632, the third folio in 1663, and the fourth folio in 1685. So in looking at each of these in turn today, this is going to be sort of a preview for a pair of exhibitions that CMU Libraries is sponsoring and organizing and that I'm curating. Both of those exhibitions will be open on the 1st of April. One will be downstairs in the lobby of the Hunt Library, and another will actually be at the Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh, and that's where these books will be on display. And that's to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first folio, 1623 to 2023. So this object in front of me, the first folio, is in fact as of this week, 400 years old. So like I said, we're going to be looking at each of these in turn, and I hope that you leave today with a sense of why these books are still important for 100 years later. Why we still are interested in keeping them in a collection like special collections in the libraries, and why it's important that we provide access to students, scholars, and faculty in this space. So we'll start with Shakespeare's first folio, and that's open in front of me here. You could probably recognize the title page. It has this iconic engraved image of Shakespeare's face. And that's significant because it's really one of the only confirmed likenesses of Shakespeare to survive to the present. So because of the first folio, we know more or less what Shakespeare looked like. So we'll look sort of down the title page starting at the top. The full title, it's known as the first folio, but the title itself on the title page is Mr. William Shakespeare's comedies, histories, and tragedies. So it's dividing Shakespeare's plays into those genre categories that we recognize still today. And then at the base of the page, underneath the frontispiece portrait, is London, was printed in London at the print shop of Isaac Jaggard in 1623. And then Edward Blunt was one of the publishers responsible for sort of funding the project. So one question that I often get when I talk about the folios is what is a folio? It's sort of a fancy term of art, but it's really simple. So folio means that the sheets of paper that made up this book were only folded once before they were bound into a volume. And it's a Latin term. There are other terms like quarto and octavo, which are smaller in size. But the important point that you should take away is that folio was in general the largest format, the largest size of book in the period. And the fact that Shakespeare's plays were published in this format was quite unusual. This is the very first time that a folio book was dedicated exclusively to plays, dramatic texts. So from the get-go it's sort of an unusual project, an unusual production. Why is the first folio so significant? So it's significant this year, of course, because we're celebrating the 400th anniversary. But it's also significant because it publishes a prince 36 of Shakespeare's plays. He's known to have at least collaborated or written entirely 39 plays. So it's not every play that Shakespeare had a part in writing, but it's the vast majority. And 18 of the 36 that are in this book were published in no other format. So the implication is if the first folio had never been printed, if the first folio didn't sort of survive to the present, Shakespeare's canon of plays would be reduced by half. We would have lost those 18 plays. And they're not minor plays. They're plays that we would have read in high school English, or would have seen maybe like Macbeth, The Tempest. These are major plays that really owe their survival to this particular book. So I think that's kind of the first theme of this evening is how print can sort of cause or affect the preservation of really important works of literary art in the period. And that theme of preservation, that theme of sort of gathering all of Shakespeare's plays into one book really attends the first folio from the get-go. So I can't remember if I read this earlier, but underneath the title, Comedy, Sisters and Tragedies, there's this claim that they have been published according to the true original copies. So on the title page, very beginning, there's this sort of claim to be sort of faithful to what Shakespeare actually wrote. And true copies, true original copies, there's some scholarly debate about what that means, but in general it's either an earlier printed version of the play or in fact a manuscript either in Shakespeare's hand or a manuscript that would have been used in the playhouse, the Globe for example, where Shakespeare's plays were performed. So the printers would have gathered these copies, these exemplars of Shakespeare's plays and then printed this book from them, right? The point is the editors are really clear in saying we're trying to be as faithful to Shakespeare's original writings as possible. And that continues in the preface. So I'm going to sort of page through the book and you can see just what a 17th century book looks like. This is fairly typical of the folio format. You have this beautiful woodcut headpiece here. There's this dedicatory epistle, dedicatory letter to sort of aristocratic patrons of this project and patrons of the King's Men who were Shakespeare's acting troupe. The third leaf paging through, you get this address to the great variety of readers. So this is the editors and that's John Heming and Henry Condol who are both actors and friends of Shakespeare. They're the ones responsible for gathering the plays together to be published. So they're addressing the potential buyers here, the potential readers of the first folio. Let's see if I can really quickly find it here. So I'll just read briefly because I think this section of their letter to the reader really kind of drives home that interest in preservation and accuracy. So they write, it had been a thing we confess worthy to have been wished that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings. But since it hath been ordained otherwise, he died before the first folio was published. And I don't think I mentioned that, but the first folio, 1623, Shakespeare dies in 1616. So this is published seven years after his death. He's not involved in its publication. But so they're saying here, you know, we wish he had been around to sort of oversee the printing and publication of his plays. But since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends, the office of their care and pain to have collected and published them and sort of published them as were before. You were abused with diverse stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposter. You can tell that these are actors writing this. But the point here they're making is the previous versions, the previous printings of Shakespeare's plays are inaccurate. They're not up to the snuff that you see in the first folio. They in contrast are taking care with Shakespeare's plays. And I'll skip down a bit, but see they say we want to offer them to your view cured and perfect of their limbs and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived them. So there again there's this promise at the very beginning that they've taken care to edit and gather the plays in a way that they think Shakespeare would have approved. And I really love that the first folio begins under that heading because it's proven to be true in history, right? As I mentioned earlier, because of the survival of the first folio, we have these plays, we can read them, we can study them and we can perform them. And that wouldn't have been the case without the care that Shakespeare's friends John Heming and Henry Condole took to gather them together like this. So I'll turn this back around and just page through briefly. So the format of the book, you have the layout of the book. You have these sort of dedicatory letters that you have a number of poems, again by Shakespeare's friends, kind of praising his plays. And then you have a catalog of the several comedies, histories and tragedies. It lists all of the plays again under those generic headings, comedies, histories, tragedies. And then you just sort of jump in to the tempest. It's the first play. But I'll leave this open because this is typical of what an opening of the first folio looks like. It's 900 pages, so there's a lot of text here. But you have two columns on each page kind of lined or bordered by these rules, printed rules here. And so that's a typical opening of the first folio. I want to talk briefly too about the history of this particular copy. This was given to the university by Charles Rosenblum, who was a major entrepreneur in Pittsburgh. He died in 1973, so this came to us after his death in 1974. And the story there is kind of amusing in that he was Yale alumni, alumnus, and the agreement he made with the Beinecke, which is the rare book library at Yale, was that they would get all of his books except in the cases where they already had a copy. So because Yale already had a first folio, he said, then all the rest go to CMU. So that's because Yale had a duplicate or a first folio already, we ended up with ours. That's pretty surprising and pretty exciting that we ended up with that. So I think I've touched on everything I wanted to mention with the first folio, but what I want you to keep in mind as we look at later folios is how the framing of Shakespeare's plays either stays the same or evolves and changes through each edition. So we'll move on to the second folio, which was printed in 1632. And in some sense, the second folio is actually the least interesting of the four. And one reason for that is because the first folio sold relatively well, 1623 to 1632. It's only nine years, and that might seem like a long time, but if you print a thousand copies, as there probably was about that many copies of the first folio, if you can sell a thousand copies in ten years, you're doing pretty well in the 17th century book market. So the first edition sells out. There's still demand for Shakespeare's plays, so it's essentially reprinted. And it is exactly that. It's basically a sort of unproblematic reprinting of the first folio. The plays are in the same order. You have the same kind of introductory material. You have the poems that Shakespeare's friends wrote, reprinted. The title is the same. There's Shakespeare's face again. But there are a couple of things that are changed. And if you look at the imprint, which has like the name of the printers and the publishers, you notice that will have changed, right? So in the intervening about decade, there's a new kind of consortium, I guess we can call it that, of publishers that come together to reissue the folio in a second edition. And the reasons for that are interesting. I can't really get into all the complexities. But one thing I'd like to point out is in the 1630s, certainly in the 17th century, copyright didn't really exist. So when Shakespeare was living, he would have brought a play if he authorized its printing to a publisher or printer. And then the publisher would pay him a flat sum and then they would then profit on that project going forward. Shakespeare wouldn't receive any royalties from the printing of his plays after that first transaction. And because of that, you ended up with this sort of chaotic situation in which individual printers, individual publishers throughout London's bookselling district held the rights to individual Shakespeare plays, right? No one person, no one publisher owned all of Shakespeare's 36, 39 plays. And that's partly what makes the first folio's publication so astonishing. It's kind of miraculous that enough publishers were able to collaborate to sort of pool their resources, to pool their rights to Shakespeare's plays, to print them all together. And it didn't happen easily. Again, I can't get into all the details, but there was quite a bit of bickering between the publishers. And in some cases, they were holdouts. So one publisher didn't want to have a particular one play that he held and it only came to the project, to the table quite late in the project. So all of which is to say copyrights in the period, such as they were, traded hands pretty regularly, right? So if a publisher died, it might pass to his widow or his apprentice or his son. And then those rights could be sold, right, as a commodity in the book trade. So in the intervening ten years, nine years between the first and the second folio, you have new publishers and a new printer responsible for its publication. And that's kind of the reason for that. The rights have changed hands. But otherwise, as I said, it looks really similar. And that'll be a kind of recurrent theme. But you see here right under the title and you have that phrase again published according to the true original copies that it is marked as the second impression, right? So the second edition. So I'm going to turn, though, because what I think makes the second folio most interesting, at least from kind of the perspective of literary history, is some other poems have been added in Praise of Shakespeare. And the second poem on this page, even though it's not attributed, you don't have the name of the poet, we know that this was written by John Milton, who if any of you have taken an English class might recognize that name. John Milton is probably the second most important poet-writer in the 17th century after Shakespeare, certainly the most important in the later 17th century. But he was only 23 when he wrote this poem, so very young. And this is his first poem that appears in print. So I think that's really kind of an amazing example of how the English literary canon kind of assembles itself in this period. And it's evidence that John Milton was an avid reader of Shakespeare. And I'll point out some of my colleagues, Claire Bourne, her name is, she's a professor at Penn State University. She's recently discovered at the Free Library in Philadelphia that their copy of the first folio has annotations, handwritten annotations in it that she was able to prove were John Milton's. So the Free Library in Philadelphia has John Milton's first folio. It's really phenomenal, a bit of scholarly sleuthing. But the point there is that there's a connection between that copy of the first folio in Philadelphia and this poem on this page is when Milton was young, he obviously was reading Shakespeare in depth and in detail. And that's what this poem is about. He's praising Shakespeare's art. And he's also saying, I won't read it in full, but the gist of the poem is Shakespeare doesn't need a massive tomb, some monument to his memory because the folio functions as that monument. The folio functions as a lasting monument. That's a phrase that he uses. So that's a really kind of amazing idea. And it goes back to what I was talking about with the first folio where from the beginning there was this interest in preserving Shakespeare in the form of a book, and I think Milton understood that. So as I said, it's really comparable to what's in the first folio, so I won't leaf through it. But I do want to show you all the binding of this copy. This copy of the second folio came from Charles Rosenblum as well, who gifted the first folio in his will to the university. But this is a spectacular copy of the second folio because it's an original binding. So this binding dates to 1630s, certainly, maybe not 1632. But it's more than likely that the original buyer of this copy took it, had it bound, and it's been in this binding ever since. But it's very typical style of mid-17th century binding. This is calf. It's kind of animal skin, cow skin basically. I don't know if you'll be able to make it out in the video, but it just has very simple lines kind of etched into or stamped into the boards. And then the spine originally would have been completely empty. The Shakespeare on the spine and the date were added quite a bit later, probably even 19th century. But this is what a second folio would have looked like in 1632 on someone's shelf, so that's pretty amazing. The other copy of the second folio, which I have here, this is from the Posner Memorial Collection. So Henry Posner Sr. was another sort of entrepreneur in Pittsburgh, major collector of books in the 20th century, and he acquired a copy of the second, third, and fourth, which are now held by the libraries in the Posner Memorial Collection. But just in point of contrast, right, if you look here, it's a spectacularly beautiful binding that has guilt edges. The boards are decorated in these sort of arabesque and sort of plant patterns, flowers all in guilt and gold on this lovely dark blue leather. Obviously this has been rebound to fit the tastes of probably a 19th century collector, right, because all the folios have always been incredibly valued by collectors. So they would have their copies taken out of these original kind of ugly basic bindings and have them rebound in this kind of opulent style. And it is a beautiful piece of art. I mean, the binder did amazing work here, but you can see what's lost here. This is quite a bit thicker, hopefully you can see that. So when a book was rebound in the 19th century, they would press it. So it would lose a lot of its heft, a lot of its weight and size. So we're lucky to have copies that do survive in these original bindings because we get a sense of their original dimensions. So we move on to the third folio, which we have, as I mentioned, in two copies. On my right is the Posner Memorial Collection, and on my left is the Charles Rosenblum copy. So I mentioned that the second folio, to me at least, in some way is the least interesting of the four. I think the third is the most interesting, and that's true for a number of reasons. To begin with, the 1640s and 1650s were a fairly chaotic time in English society. There's the English Civil War and the 1640s, and then in the later 1640s or early 1640s under Oliver Cromwell, the theaters in London were actually closed. So attendance to plays basically went to zero. And the effect of that is that when people went to plays, they sort of fueled demand for plays in print. So when that goes away, there's much less of a demand in the bookseller's stalls for printed plays. And I think that explains in part the gap between the second folio, printed in 1632, and the third printed in 1663, right, 30 years. The third folio is also interesting because it's the rarest of the four. So I mentioned earlier that there are 228 copies that survive of the first folio, and 80 some of those are in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which is a separate story. But there are only 180 that survive of the third folio. So kind of an interesting boast that because we have two copies here, there are in fact more than 1% of the surviving edition at CMU of the third folio, which is pretty great. The reason for that rarity, right, why are they so much rare than the first folio? So something happened in London in 1666. There was a massive fire, particularly in the districts around St. Paul's Cathedral. And that just so happens to be where all of the book shops, print shops, bookseller's shops were concentrated in 17th century London. So when the fire tore through the city, it destroyed a lot of unsold stock of books. So this is printed in 1663. Not many copies are going to sell in three years. So we can assume that a lot of those copies actually burned in the fire, which again explains its rarity. The third reason why I find the third folio so kind of odd or interesting is that it exists in two versions, two states, as it's called in bibliography. So the first, on my left, this is from the Rosenblum copy. It was issued, as you can see on the title page, it has 1663 as its data publication. And it's basically just like the second folio to the first, an untroubled reprinting of what was in the second folio, same number of plays, and you have the change, a very basic change on the title page where it's marking it as the third impression. A year later, seven more plays were printed and included with unsold copies of the third folio. And I think the reason for this is because maybe it wasn't selling as well as they had hoped, so they needed to find some way to differentiate the third folio from the second to the first. They wanted to convince buyers that, no, you're getting something more by purchasing this particular edition than you would have if you bought a second folio secondhand. So this is the second state of the title page. You can see the difference here. The engraved portrait has moved to face the textural content of the title page. And you have this advertisement basically saying, and onto this impression is added seven plays never before printed in folio, vis-a-vis, and then it gives a list of the seven titles that are included. The irony here is that only one of these plays is actually by Shakespeare, and that's Pericles, Prince of Tyre. And we, the scholars, Shakespeare scholars, are fairly certain that he only played a part in writing Pericles. It was probably a collaboration with another playwright. So the choice to include these six other apocryphal plays, not by Shakespeare, is kind of an odd one. But again, I think the motivation was commercial, trying to convince buyers that, oh, there's more in this edition, so you should go ahead and buy it, if you have the second folio already or the first folio already. So a fascinating example of how the Shakespeare canon, what plays were accepted to be by Shakespeare, kind of fluctuates in the period. And that's right here demonstrated on this page. So the last thing I'll mention about our two copies of the third folio is just pointing out their bindings. So if you look at them, they look almost identical, which I think is really amazing. And just like one of our copies of the second, I think that these are actually the original bindings that would have been put on or commissioned by the original buyers. But you'll do a close-up here, so you can see that they have the same sort of pattern of two lines on the edge of the spine, two lines around, and the edges, the fore edge, which is the paper itself, is kind of speckled or painted in this kind of blotchy red pattern in both. So I don't really know what's going on here, but my theory is that these two copies were purchased really close in time to each other, and they might have even been brought to the same binding studio, the same bindery in London, you know, by separate buyers. And when they commissioned the bindings, you know, being in the same shop, they would have used the same tools, the same materials, and that explains why they look so similar. So because of this, because both of our copies of the third folio survive in their original bindings, they really are spectacular copies. You know, it's hard to find a third folio that's in this kind of state and this condition elsewhere in the United States. So we'll end with the fourth folio, which we have in two copies. This is the Posner copy closed on the table here, and this is the Rosenblum copy open in front of me. So interestingly, the fourth folio is in some ways the most deluxe of the four. It's printed on paper that's of a higher quality, and you can't really put them side by side, but you might remember that the paper in the preceding folios is a little bit darker, maybe thinner, you can't really tell the thickness here, but this is just very white and very tall for a folio. There's a sense in which the publishers of this edition kind of win all out to make it into this sort of deluxe object and artifact. It's also interesting because it's the first time that the title page actually emphasizes the words plays instead of comedies, histories, and tragedies, which are still at the top and still large, but maybe the reason for this is those generic categories, comedies, histories, and tragedies are becoming less important than the more broad term of plays. But otherwise, moving from the third folio to the fourth folio, it's basically just a reprinting. Again, you have the fourth edition marked on the title page, and interestingly, you have the inclusion of those seven plays that were first introduced in the reissued version of the third folio, starting with Pericles. It's funny too that on the title page, it says it claims that it's never before printed these seven plays in folio. We know that's not true. Those appeared 20 years before in the third folio. But again, booksellers, they're excellent at marketing their products, and I think that, again, was trying to convince people to purchase this particular edition. So you still have the image of Shakespeare, the plates, the copper plate that the engraving was made on has been modified slightly over the decades. We've covered almost a full century, going from 1623 to 1685. So this plate probably took a lot of damage and wear and being reprinted, so it had to be retouched. But otherwise, it's essentially the same, and I'll open it so you can see that the format is consistent. You have two columns of text underneath the heading of the title of the play. Because of that, I actually wanted to focus on something that doesn't really have anything to do with Shakespeare at all with this particular copy. And to do that, I'm going to page to the beginning inside the binding. We see a couple of things going on. So first of all, we have Charles Rosenbloom's book plate. That's the most recent. He's the most recent private owner before it came to CMU. But we also have underneath his plate a book plate for Belton House, which is a sort of aristocratic estate in Lincolnshire in England that was owned by the Brownlow family in this period, in the 1680s and 1690s. But if you look across at the facing page, there's something really interesting, I think, going on. And that is there's a signature for Alice Brownlow. And Alice Brownlow was the wife of Sir John Brownlow, who was the owner of Belton House. But there's also, if you look here, it looks like someone started to write Alice but then has changed to Margaret Brownlow. And the reason that's significant is that Alice had a number of daughters, one of whom was named Margaret. So this is a really beautiful instance of a mother kind of maybe instructing her daughter in handwriting. The first Alice or the second Alice here seems to be kind of trying to imitate the Alice down here. So, you know, you can sort of spin all kinds of stories about what's happening here. But I think this is a really wonderful window onto how Shakespeare's folios existed in a domestic setting at some point, right? I mean, it was always kind of an elite object. It was always expensive. The first, second, third and fourth would not have been affordable to most people, which explains partly it's kind of noble or aristocratic provenance here. But nevertheless, right, once they were in these kind of elite settings, these elite homes, these books became educational objects, right? Maybe Margaret, the daughter of Alice, learned how to read from, you know, the fourth folio. They maybe they read the plays together. And also below this, I'll point out that someone, maybe Margaret has written out measure for measure, which is a play title of one of Shakespeare's plays. So, that's just an example of the kinds of evidence that book historians and bibliographers look for to study the provenance, right, the individual history of books. And I think we're really fortunate that this evidence survives in this copy because it could have easily been kind of torn away and replaced when it was rebound if another, you know, buyer chose to rebind it. So, amazing little window into the past. And now this book's history includes not only Belton House, but CMU Libraries. So, we'll end actually with something that's not a book at all. It's this strange looking object behind me. This is actually the first thing that I purchased for the collection when I started in March 2020. It's a Hinman collator, and you're asking, well, what's its relevance to the first folio? So, this was actually designed and invented by a scholar, a Shakespeare scholar named Charlton Hinman in the 50s. And he designed it to compare multiple copies of the first folio kind of simultaneously. And that's, you know, collator basically meaning to compare two things. So, the way that it works, it's really quite fascinating. You put one copy of the first folio on the left side, on the cradle there, another copy on the right side, and then you set it to oscillate. And if you look through the eyepiece, and press this button down here, the blinker goes sort of back and forth, basically revealing one copy after the other. And when you look through the eyepiece, what happens is your brain is sort of tricked into seeing both copies simultaneously. And the value of that is that any difference, right, if there's, you know, a different spelling of a particular word on the page in this copy, that'll show up, it'll kind of shift in the eyepiece. You'll be able to see it much more easily than if you were to sort of look at both simultaneously and go back and forth by eye. So, the reason that Charlton Hinman built this is that he wanted to look at as many copies of the first folio as possible. And he actually ended up looking at 55 of them. He was working at the Folger Shakespeare Library in D.C., which has that many copies, in fact, more. And what he revealed in his research is that no two copies of the first folio are actually identical in any way. So, each has a unique form of the text of Shakespeare's printed plays. You know, it might vary, as I said, in some minor spelling or in some other way. And the reason why that's valuable knowledge to Shakespeare scholars is that, knowing that, you really have to look at multiple copies to decide what is the most accurate or most correct version of a particular scene or line, right? And there are a lot of examples of this variation. I mean, one of the most well-known, one of the most extensive comes in the final act of Othello, where Desdemona is singing a song, and the full line is actually changed. And I'll try to show that on screen here. Just give that a second to play. So you can see how the line actually is changing, and some copies of the first folio have one version, and other copies have another. So that's an example of something that Charlton Hinman uncovered by using the Hinman collator. Interesting historical point is that Charlton Hinman, before he turned to working on Shakespeare's early printed books, worked during World War II as a crypt analyst. So he was actually working to break mainly Japanese encryptions during World War II. And I think, you know, the theory among scholars is that he used a lot of that knowledge in not only designing this particular device, but also in the approach that he took to studying Shakespeare's plays. So this object is going to be on display in the first floor of Hunt Library in the exhibition that starts in March, and will be open officially in April. So I'd encourage you to come see it. Take a closer look. It is totally fascinating. It's an example of, you know, the space age meeting book history. And I'll end by pointing out that this tradition of using technology to study early printed books is alive and well, even at CMU. I'm part of a project that's headed by Professor Chris Warren, who's in the English department here, that's actually using computer vision and machine learning to look for a lot of the same kinds of evidence that Charlton Hinman was looking for on this device. So it's a fascinating history. It's a fascinating tradition. And that'll really be the theme of the exhibition that's on the first floor in Hunt later this year. So I want to thank you all tonight for attending this look into all seven of CMU Library Shakespeare Folios. And I want to invite you again to come to the two exhibitions that the libraries will be sponsoring. One in Hunt Library on the first floor and one at the Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh. Those are both, they will both be open on the first of April. I look forward to your questions at the Q&A and thank you again. Well, thank you, Sam, for a wonderful presentation. You always entertain and inform us, and I can see from the questions that the audience very much is engaged with what you've shared with us. I also think it's fitting. I was waiting for you to pivot to your right a little bit and show that not only do you have the Hinman collator, but pretty much adjacent to it are our two enigma machines. And I did wonder if you were going to make that connection. So you mentioned at the end the two exhibitions coming up. Firstly, the one in Hunt Library. Secondly, the one that we are partnering with the Frick Museum to host later this year. Could you tell us a bit more about what we could expect when we visit those exhibitions? Yeah, happily. First of all, thanks everyone for attending, and I'm really looking forward to answering your questions and getting into a conversation with Keith. So very glad to be here and glad you're all here. Yeah, so the exhibitions, it's a major event, the four centuries of Shakespeare's first folio. So basically anyone, any collection that has a copy of the first folio will be marking it in some way. So what makes CMU's celebration the first folio unique is this partnership with the Frick Art Museum, which is in Pittsburgh's east end in the Point Breeze neighborhood. So the exhibit there is actually going to be installed in their Jacobean room, or their English room, which is really exciting because that room, it's sort of octagonal, is actually paneled in 17th century carved oak that was brought from England by the Fricks. So it's going to be a really nice example of the venue, the exhibition venue, kind of reflecting the historical events of the things that are going to be on display, right? All the folios that are in the libraries here. So the theme of the Frick exhibit is really, but I talked about in this, in the pre-recorded section, how do the folios relate? How do they diverge? What makes each copy, what makes each addition unique and significant? And then the Hunt Gallery, which is on the first floor, which is right there and right now, is, as I said, going to focus on kind of the surprising history of technological invention and innovation that have been prompted by research into Shakespeare folios. I mean, it's been called, the first folio has been called the most thoroughly studied early modern book, which is true. So much has been written about the first folio in particular and the later folios as well. And I think scholars were always eager to find ways to make that research more efficient and effective. So, you know, the hymn collater, which is right behind me, is really the origin point of this tradition and the exhibition in Hunt is going to sort of trace that from, you know, the 50s when hymn starts his prototyping all the way to the present. And I'll point out that the gallery, the exhibition in Hunt will really feature some fascinating ongoing work at CMU. I mentioned the project that I've been working on with Professor Chris Warren in the English department, which is basically using artificial intelligence to, you know, find new evidence in early print books. That'll be represented. There's also a project headed up by Professor Stephen Whittock, also in the English department at CMU called Shakespeare VR. And basically what that is, is a model of three-dimensional interactive virtual reality model of a Jacobean playhouse that, you know, students, anyone really can put on a VR headset and interact with and kind of navigate through. So that'll also be on display. But yeah, the general sense is the Frick display will be focusing on the history of the folios, their cultural and literary significance and the display in Hunt is going to be on the technologies that have been prompted by research into Shakespeare's text. So I really hope you can all make it. As we had anticipated, the most asked question from our audience has been about gloves. People surprised that you're not wearing white gloves, worrying about damage to volumes. I know we've talked about this many times, Sam. Please give us your perspective. Yeah, I mean, it's a very common question and I'm glad when we receive it because, you know, to me, that suggests that, you know, you all watching are concerned about the these books and want them to be well cared for. But the consensus among conservators, you know, people who treat, you know, ancient books, rare books, is that you're far more likely to damage paper if you have gloves on because, you know, all of us almost every day, we turn pages in books. So as your hands are clean, you have much more, you know, tactile accuracy, right, as you're turning them. So, you know, if you put it in contrast, if you have a white glove on that might be kind of loose, you're more likely to snag a corner and actually pull it and potentially tear the paper. So, yeah, the consensus is the best way to handle rare books is just a clean pair of hands without gloves on. But yeah, I'm glad it came up. There was also a question early in the showing of your pre-recorded material about handouts, because some of the images were not terribly clear. I'm not going to ask you to prepare handouts, but you might like to point people to the digital versions that we have of the folios. Yeah, and I'm happy to share a link to that, but we have a digital collections platform in the libraries, which is where we put all of the books that we've scanned up, you know, accessible freely. And all of our, it looks like so many just shared the link, so that's great. So, all of our folios are at least one copy. Each of the second, third and fourth are currently available and we've successfully scanned the first folio and other copies of the second, third and fourth. So, those will all be launched on our digital collections platform kind of in conjunction with exhibitions. But if you go to that link that was just shared in chat and, you know, search for Shakespeare's comedy histories and tragedies, you can see high-resolution scans of at least one copy of our seven. A question from our friend Ed Galloway, just on the road at the University of Pittsburgh. When were the folios first called? First, second, third, fourth. Probably when the first one was published it wasn't called the first folio. Do you have any sense of the history of the numbering of the folios? That's a really good question. I mean, I think really early on, as soon as there were two of them, you know, they might not have been referred to as like the second folio or the first folio but certainly the second edition of Shakespeare's plays in folio, right? You get mentions of that even pretty early on when people are recording the fact that they bought a copy of the second folio. They refer to it in that way. But in terms of the sequence of four, I think we really owe that to some of the earliest editors of Shakespeare's plays. So the period that I've read the most about this and as really the 18th century, you know, Samuel Johnson who's, you know, lexicography edited and put to compile Johnson's dictionary in English language. He was an early editor with George Stevens of Shakespeare's plays and they write in a lot of their commentary and I think in some of their prefaces to the plays they edited about how the first folio is really the best and in fact the second, third and fourth are really just, you know, mere imitations of the first. There's this great phrase that George Stevens uses where he refers to the later folios, the second, third and fourth as quote, mere waste paper. Right, so there is I think pretty early on this hierarchy in the sense that the first is the best and the later folios are lesser, you know, follow-ups to it. You know, just to kind of wander into the world of antiquarian books and the sort of collectors market briefly, that's basically stayed consistent to the present. I mean the first folio is certainly still the most desirable but, you know, you see a lot of people now finding more interest in collecting the later folios just because of the reasons that I went through in the video. I mean they are still significant documents, each of which has, you know, some unique feature that I think makes them worth having, worth owning. Yeah, that's a really good question but I, yeah, I think probably the 18th century is my best guess when that would make sense to say first, second and third folium. We've got a number of other great questions but I'm afraid we are pretty much out of time for questions. I would maybe invite you, if you could give a quick answer to one that really catches my eye what technology was used for the printing. That may not be that's a brief question but. Yeah. Yeah, so actually two technologies so I mentioned the engraved furnace piece so that was actually made from an engraved plate so the lines were actually incised into a plate of copper and then that would be, have been run through what's called a rolling press at very high pressure but the text itself was printed on a common press which is, would have been, you know, in the 16, 16 20, 1630s essentially equivalent to what, you know, Gutenberg was working on you know, a couple of centuries century and a half before so but the technology itself basically amounts to individual pieces of type which each carry a letter and then those letters would be inked and then a piece of paper passed through the press pressed with a lot of pressure again and when you take the paper away having made an impression you have a complete sheet that then be folded and then bound in. That's a very, very quick answer. There's a lot of scholars that have worked on what presses and press technology look like in the 17th century. Right, well thank you very much, Senem and this brings to the end the Shakespeare part of this afternoon's program. Thank you all for joining us. This is as we've said a couple of times the first in a series of events to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's first folio I do hope you'll have an opportunity if you're in Pittsburgh to come to Hunt Library and to the Frick Museum to look at the exhibitions. Sam also mentioned some fascinating research being conducted at CMU that will expand our understanding of Shakespeare, of the publications and of the literary world of the age. If you've enjoyed this event please consider supporting the libraries with a gift to the Special Collections Acquisitions Fund your donations help Sam acquire collections that make possible transformative research and scholarship and support programs that bring students, scholars and members of the public into the Special Collections and Kanagamelon's libraries. We also invite you to join us at a couple of events later this month and there is a QR code on the screen if you would like to open our events page. Next week I'll be hosting an event as part of Kanagamelon's Faculty Dialogues series on the topic of open and automated science at Kanagamelon very different from today's Shakespeare event. I'll be joined by a panel of CMU experts for a discussion about open research, open science and automated science and the ways in which data sharing and reuse can accelerate scientific progress. Later this month I'll host an event called Citizen Science and Community Data inspiring engagement between Kanagamelon and local communities full details on both of those events at the events page. So again thank you Sam so much for sharing your expertise with us thanks to my team for helping us. Well thanks to all of you for joining us this afternoon. I hope you have a great evening. Enjoy the rest of the day.