In 2020 a complete copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio sold at auction for almost 10 million dollars, a world-record price for any work of literature. Unfortunately we do not have that First Folio in the studio with us today, but we do have one single, original page from each of the Four Folios; a little Shakespearean variety pack. These pages were collected from defective copies of the Folios and assembled into a leaf book, with an original introductory essay by Edwin Elliott Willoughby. Only 73 of these leaf books were published by the Grabhorn Press in 1935. In this episode we’ll talk about these particular four pages, leaf books in general, and the persistent mysteries surrounding Shakespeare’s life and works.
Brattlecast #117 - The First American Bible
Today in the studio we have a very special item: a single page from a copy of the first Bible printed in Colonial America. Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, also known as the Eliot Indian Bible, is a translation of the Geneva Bible into Natick, a previously unwritten dialect spoken by the Algonqian peoples of Massachusetts (British publishers held a monopoly on the publication of English-language Bibles, so none were printed in America until after the revolution). This Bible was the work of John Eliot, a Puritan missionary, and a team of Algonquin translators. Printed in Cambridge it took over 14 years to produce. You can view the full Bible here and learn more about its laborious, painstaking creation on today’s episode.