mended, £63. In 1824 Mr. Thorpe the bookseller advertised a set of the four folios—first, £65; second, 10 guineas; third, £25; and the fourth, 6 guineas, or the four for £100. About the same time Mr. Pickering marked a similar set £95.
Copies of the first folio are so constantly sold that one might suppose it to be a common book, but this may be accounted for by the fact that they are constantly changing hands. There are only a few copies absolutely perfect, but others are made up from various copies, or with pages in facsimile. This makes the most imperfect copies of value, because they can be used to perfect others.
Dibdin described thirty copies of the first folio in his “Library Companion,” and these he arranged in three classes. In the first class he placed three copies, belonging respectively to Mr. Cracherode, the Right Hon. Thomas Grenville, and Mr. Daniel Moore. The first two are now in the British Museum, and the third is the Daniel copy, for which Lilly the bookseller offered £300.
“These have size, condition, and the genuine properties of a true copy. They are thirteen inches in height, eight and a half in width, have the true portrait and title-page, with the genuine verses in the centre of the leaf facing the title-page. They have no spurious leaves foisted in from other editions.... Of these three copies, that in the Cracherode collection is the most objectionable, as the commendatory verses of Ben Jonson, facing the title-page, are, although genuine, inlaid.”
Mr. Grenville’s copy was bought at Saunders’s sale in 1818 for £121, 16s., which was then thought to be a great sum, and Dibdin makes the unfortunate prophecy that this was “the highest price ever given, or likely to be given, for the volume.” Mr. Grenville told Dibdin that an ancestor of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn possessed an uncut copy of the first folio. “It was lying on the table in that condition when, in a luckless moment, a