Other than the King James Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio is arguably the most fetishized book in the world. Sir John Suckling felt compelled to have Anthony Van Dyck paint him holding a copy of it open to Hamlet. Building upon the work of such scholars as Paul Werstine, Richard Knowles, James West, and Eric Rasmussen, this special session will take us from the Frankfurt Book Fair, a major entrepot for the sale of books, where the First Folio was placed on the international book market in the early modern period, to late 19th-century America where Richard Grant White would introduce the Riverside Shakespeare (1883) to readers and scholars, who enjoyed Shakespeare's plays. This special session seeks to trace the First Folio from its sale at the Frankfurt Book Fair to the process of demediation by which individual leaves of the First Folio function as fetishized literary relics. In Rhonda Sharrah's essay,Fetishizing William Shakespeare's First Folio, she asserts Shakespeare's First Folio has been analyzed over the centuries from every angle and methodology literary scholarship has to offer. It was listed in two catalogues as intended for sale at the Frankfurt Book Fair, an important hub of early modern transnational book trade. What might we learn from looking at the First Folio from the outside of its specifically insular context, seeing it as a niche product in the wider market in competition with other literature with various vernaculars? If the First Folio is fetishized as an early moment of Shakespeare's apotheosis as a universal genius, it seems necessary to look beyond the borders for our understanding of its context. Examination of the Fair and its trends, participants, and operations may unsettle prevailing narratives about this very famous book, and add a transnaational perspective to the field's long fascination with it.

In Mark Bayer's essay, Richard Grant White and the Rediscovery of the First Folio in America, argues how editing Shakespeare during the nineteenth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, had become highly competitive with editorial squabbles proliferating as quickly as the market for new editions expanded. One of the most popular editions of this era was Richard Grant White's Riverside Edition (1883), which would introduce students and other readers to Shakespeare for over a century. Using three copies of the folio that had recently been brought to New York’s Astor library, White provided a fresh collation of the text, vigorously argued for the supremacy of the folio, and embedded that principle in his groundbreaking edition. In this paper, Bayer argues that White’s privileging of the folio allowed for a resurgence of interest in that text in the United States and paved the way for its acquisition by numerous American collectors over the next several decades.

Philip Zaboroski's essay, The Fourfold Fetishization of the First Four Folios of William Shakespeare, argues how in 1935 the Grabhorn Press of San Francisco's printing 73 copies of a book with the rather unwieldy title of Original Leaves from the First Four Folios of the Plays of William Shakespeare, 1623, 1632, 1663, 1685 initiated the process of festishizing pages from Shakespeare's folios. Printed at the behest of San Francisco rare books dealer David Bickersteth Magee, these books contain—as their title states—tipped-in leaves from the first four folios, Drawing upon the work of Garrett Stewart on bookwork, Zaboroski interrogates the process of “demediation” which occurs in the construction of these leafbooks and what makes this particular edition a significant aberration among the genre.

During the production of a typical leaf book, the leaf undergoes a “demediating” dismemberment for inclusion in the book. No longer meant to be read, but instead admired, the leaf itself becomes an object of study, with the conceptual labor performed being a fetishistic display. The leaf is transformed from a page in an incunabula, into a work of art housed within its own gallery—the leaf-book itself. For the vast majority of leaf books, their central aim (aside from profit) is to display the skills of Gutenberg, Caxton, Manutius, and Morris. However, in the case of Original Leaves from the First Four Folios, the emphasis is instead placed upon the allure of the original, as if owning a piece of the folios is akin to owning a piece of Shakespeare himself. The leaves, especially the leaf from the First Folio, are displayed not as art within a gallery, but as relics within a reliquary.