First things last—a fitting introduction

Prefatory materials set a tone and introduce the book to the reader. In the period of the hand-press, the introductory materials were often among the last pages to be printed.

A printer would understand the advantages in keeping that material to one gathering—and we do too, now. But the preliminaries of the First Folio are irregular, and include one and a half extra sheets. As has been the case before, we can think about this irregularity as a window into a certain amount of uncertainty and problem-solving about what exactly was to be contained in the preliminaries.

An engraved frontispiece authorial portrait signaled the significance of this collection of plays. An author portrait also required some additional problem-solving in the print shop. An engraving had to be printed on a “rolling press,” for the impressions an engraved plate made on a sheet of paper were the exact reverse of the impressions made by moveable type. Possibly so as not to slow work or waste paper, half-sheets of paper were run through the rolling press for the engraved author portrait. The title lines in type were added later when the page was run through the “common press.”

In this final set of exercises, the sheets are already put together. Two of them must be nested together in one particular way, because the text runs on from one page to the next. A third has the Ben Jonson poem inviting readers to “looke / Not on his Picture, but his Booke.” So that calls to be positioned facing the portrait, which is on a half-sheet. And there is yet another printed sheet. How did the printers integrate these extra pages into the introductory materials? There are two solutions found in various copies.

Preliminaries Solution #1