In October 2020 a single book sold at Christie’s in New York for ten million dollars, the most expensive work of literature ever auctioned. It was the 1623 First Folio of William Shakespeare, a collection of scripts that in their own time were treated as disposable pop culture. This episode explains why: cheap quarto pamphlets sold for about six pence, were read until they fell apart, and ended up wrapping medicine or lining pie tins, while Shakespeare’s poetry got the prestigious octavo format reserved for poets like Ovid.

Seven years after Shakespeare’s death, John Heminges and Henry Condell gambled on an expensive folio edition that preserved 18 plays never printed before, including Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar. To do it they hired William Jaggard, a printer who had already pirated ten of Shakespeare’s plays with fake dates. We follow the chaotic production from foul papers and prompt books, the five compositors including the teenage apprentice John Leason, the casting-off process that squeezed verse into prose, and the mixed corrected and uncorrected pages that make every surviving copy unique.

• Why a bound First Folio cost about one pound, roughly two months of a skilled worker’s wages
• How printing pages one and twelve on the same sheet forced typesetters to guess and cut lines
• Why the Folger Shakespeare Library holds 82 of the 235 known copies from a run of around 750
• The 2014 discovery of an unnoticed copy in a public library in Saint-Omer, France
• How the 1998 Durham University theft was solved when Raymond Scott brought the mutilated book to the Folger