Printing the Book (First Folio)

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Printing the Book

The contents of the First Folio were compiled by Heminges and Condell, the members of the Stationers Company who published the book were the booksellers Edward Blount and the father/son team of William and Isaac Jaggard.

The Jaggards were printers as well as booksellers, an unusual but not unprecedented combination. William Jaggard has seemed an odd choice by the King's Men, since he had published the questionable collection The Passionate Pilgrim as Shakespeare's, and in 1619 had printed new editions of ten Shakespearean quartos to which he did not have clear rights, some with false dates and title pages.

It is thought that the typesetting and printing of the First Folio was such a large job that the King's Men simply needed the capacities of the Jaggards' shop. (At any rate, William Jaggard died a month before the book went on sale; most of the work in the project must have been done by his son Isaac.)

The First Folio's publishing syndicate also included two stationers who owned the rights to some of the individual plays that had been previously printed: William Aspley (Much Ado About Nothing and Henry IV, part 1, and John Smethwick (Love's Labor's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet). Smethwick had been a business partner of another Jaggard, William's brother John.

The actual printing of the Folio was likely done between April and October 1621, and then, after a break for other work, from the autumn of 1622 to autumn in the following year. The book was on sale by the end of 1623; the Bodleian Library, in Oxford, received its copy in early 1624 (which it subsequently sold for £24 as a superseded edition when the Third Folio became available in 1664).[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_folio

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