The shop smells of lamp-black, linseed oil, and damp paper. Candles gutter over a wooden press the size of a doorway. You are twelve years old, the newest printer's devil — the apprentice who fetches type, wets paper, and gets blamed for everything — in the printing house of William and Isaac Jaggard, at the sign of the Half-Eagle & Key in the Barbican, London.
William Shakespeare has been dead for seven years. And here is the frightening part: about half of his plays have never been printed. No script of Macbeth exists in any bookshop on Earth. No Tempest. No Twelfth Night, no Julius Caesar, no As You Like It. They live only in bundles of handwritten pages and the aging memories of the actors who performed them. Paper rots. Actors die. Theatres burn — the Globe itself went up in flames in 1613.
Two of Shakespeare's old friends and fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, have decided to stop the forgetting. They have gathered every script they can find — thirty-six plays — to be printed in one giant volume: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Around 900 pages. The biggest gamble this shop has ever taken.
Every page of the Folio is built letter by letter from little metal blocks called sorts. Here's the trick that breaks every apprentice's brain at first: the press stamps the page like a rubber stamp, so everything in your composing stick must be mirror-backwards — and set right to left. Master printers read backwards as easily as forwards.
Pick a word, then click letters from the type case below. Watch the stick fill from the right, every letter reversed. When you think it's set, pull a proof!
Two men run a press as a team: the beater pounds sticky ink onto the type with leather balls, and the puller heaves the bar to squeeze paper against metal. A good crew could print about 1,000 sheets a day, one heave at a time. The Folio's title page carries Martin Droeshout's engraved portrait of Shakespeare — one of the only portraits approved by people who actually knew his face.
Press and hold the button (or hold the spacebar) to ink, pull, and print your own sheet.
Thirty-six plays went into the Folio. Eighteen of them had never been printed anywhere. Drag the slider toward "a world without the Folio" and watch what smoke would have taken. Click any play to hear what you'd be losing. (Green spines had earlier cheap "quarto" printings and might have limped on without this book.)
Roughly 750 copies came off the Jaggards' press. Each dot below is one copy. Scrub through 400 years and watch fire, flood, neglect and time thin them out — until the survivors become some of the most treasured objects on Earth. About 235 copies survive today.
Isaac Jaggard looks up from the proof sheets. "Think you've learned the trade, young devil? Answer me these."