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Ownership of Shakespeare First Folios Over Four Centuries
- The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society
- Oxford University Press
- Volume 10, Number 4, December 2009
- pp. 405-408
- Article
- Additional Information
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This note provides an account of the provenance (who owned, bought, sold, and received a copy or copies) of the Shakespeare First Folio, summarizing overall shifts in ownership from 1623 to the present. It is striking how few institutions owned a First Folio in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A marked shift to institutional ownership is observable in the nineteenth century.