# Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (the Bodleian copy) > William Shakespeare - 1623 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/william-shakespeare/first-folio-bodleian/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-18 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** William Shakespeare - **Date:** 1623 - **Medium:** Letterpress printing on laid paper, black-letter and roman type, single sheets folded in folio gatherings, sewn and bound - **Dimensions:** Folio format, approximately 33.5 x 21.5 cm as bound (individual copies vary with trimming); 908 pages as issued - **Object type:** Printed book - **Period:** English, Jacobean, seventeenth century - **Current location:** Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Weston Library - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary The Bodleian Library's own copy of the 1623 First Folio, shelfmarked Arch. G c.7, is the only First Folio known to have been owned, lost and recovered by the same institution. It reached the library under Thomas Bodley's 1610 agreement with the Stationers' Company, the founding document of legal deposit in Britain, within months of publication. In the 1660s the library judged the newly issued Third Folio the more useful text and sold the First as surplus stock, along with a batch of other superseded books, to the Oxford bookseller Richard Davis.The copy then disappeared from the documentary record for roughly two and a half centuries. It resurfaced in January 1905 when Gladwyn Maurice Revell Turbutt, an undergraduate of Magdalen College whose family had owned the book since about 1750, brought it to the Bodleian's sub-librarian, Falconer Madan, apparently to have storm damage to the binding assessed. Comparing the binding tooling and the marks left by a chaining staple with other books bound for the library in the 1620s, the Bodleian's bindings expert Strickland Gibson concluded that this was the library's own lost copy, still in its original Oxford binding.A public subscription raised the 3,000 pounds needed to buy it back from the Turbutt family in 1906, in competition with the American collector Henry Clay Folger, who eventually amassed 82 First Folios and would very likely have added this one to a private collection abroad. It has remained in the Bodleian since, and since 2013 a conserved, high-resolution facsimile has been freely available online. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1623-1663 or 1664** Bodleian Library, University of Oxford `[documented]` (acquisition) Received under the agreement of 12 December 1610 between Sir Thomas Bodley and Thomas Man, Master of the Stationers' Company, by which the refounded Bodleian was entitled to a free copy of every book entered at Stationers' Hall - generally treated as the founding instrument of legal deposit in the British Isles, later extended to the Royal Library and Cambridge University Library (1662) and given statutory force by the Copyright Act of 1710. Bodley himself had died in 1613, ten years before the Folio was printed, so the library received the book under an arrangement he had set up but did not live to see used for this volume. The copy was bound for the library in Oxford, in a binding later identified as the work of the binder William Wildgoose. - **1663 or 1664-c. 1750** Richard Davis, Oxford bookseller, then unrecorded intermediate hands `[documented]` (deaccession and sale) The Third Folio, issued 1663-64, added seven plays (six now regarded as apocryphal or only partly Shakespeare's) to the 36 of the First and Second Folios, and was judged by the library the more complete and useful text. The Bodleian's benefaction register records that Richard Davis paid 24 pounds for a lot of 'superfluous library books sold by order of the Curators', of which this First Folio was one; the entry prices the batch, not the book individually, so no per-copy figure for the Folio is recoverable from it. What happened to the volume between its sale and its appearance in the Turbutt family is not documented in any source consulted for this record. - **c. 1750-January 1905** The Turbutt family, Ogston Hall, Brackenfield, Derbyshire `[documented]` (private ownership) Bought by an ancestor of the family around 1750; no purchase price or seller is recorded in the sources consulted. The book remained in the family library at Ogston Hall, apparently unrecognised for what it was, until storm or damp damage to the binding prompted its owners to have it examined. - **January 1905-1906** Gladwyn Maurice Revell Turbutt, on behalf of the Turbutt family `[documented]` (identification and repurchase) Turbutt, an undergraduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, brought the family's copy to Falconer Madan, the Bodleian's sub-librarian, in January 1905. Madan and the library's bindings specialist, Strickland Gibson, identified it as the library's own lost First Folio by comparing its Oxford binding and the physical marks of a chaining staple with other books bound for the Bodleian in the 1620s, including work attributed to the binder William Wildgoose. E. W. B. Nicholson, Bodley's Librarian, then led a public subscription to buy the volume back for 3,000 pounds; more than 80 subscribers contributed. The American collector Henry Clay Folger, who went on to assemble 82 First Folios at what became the Folger Shakespeare Library, was reported to be bidding against the library for the same copy, which is presented in Bodleian accounts as the spur for the public appeal. - **1906-present** Bodleian Library, University of Oxford `[documented]` (institutional custody) Held continuously since the 1906 repurchase, shelfmarked Arch. G c.7. Conserved and digitised in 2012-2013 under the Sprint for Shakespeare public campaign, a separate fundraising effort from the 1906 subscription, which is not to be confused with it: the 2012 campaign paid for conservation and photography and produced the freely licensed online facsimile, not for ownership of the book, which the library already held. ## Open questions - Where was the book between its sale in the 1660s and the Turbutt family's acquisition of it around 1750? No source consulted documents this stretch. - How and from whom did the Turbutt family acquire the book around 1750, and what did they pay for it? Not recorded in any source consulted. - Is there a documented manuscript price or ownership annotation inside the volume that contributed to its 1905 identification, as some popular accounts imply, or does the identification rest solely on binding and chaining evidence as the sources consulted for this record describe? This record treats the binding and chaining evidence as the documented basis and flags the annotation claim as unverified. - What exactly did the Bodleian's benefaction register record as the individual value of the First Folio within the 24-pound lot sold to Richard Davis in 1663 or 1664, if any breakdown survives, as against the value of the batch as a whole? - What is the shelfmark, acquisition history and condition of the Bodleian's second First Folio copy, distinct from Arch. G c.7, and how does its provenance compare? ## Sources - [1] Bodleian Libraries, 'The Bodleian's original First Folio of Shakespeare', The Conveyor (Bodleian blog). - [2] 'The One That Got Away', Or What You Will (Oxford Shakespeare-focused blog), 6 October 2015. Secondary account; flagged for cross-check against Bodleian primary records. - [3] Sam Kinchin-Smith, 'The First Folio at 400', London Review of Books blog, November 2023, citing Michael Dobson and Emma Smith. - [4] Folgerpedia, 'First Folios at the Folger' (82 copies held by the Folger Shakespeare Library). - [5] University of Oxford news, 'Stage and screen stars support Bodleian's Shakespeare campaign', 2 August 2012. - [6] 'The Bodleian' First Folio, Teaching the Book (academic teaching blog), 16 November 2020. - [7] folio400.com, 'Where are they?' - current worldwide census figures for surviving First Folio copies. - [8] The Stationers' Company, 'Keeping Everything Forever: The Stationers' Company and Legal Deposit'. - [9] Bodleian Libraries, 'Historical background', Legal Deposit pages. - [10] Sprint for Shakespeare campaign site (Bodleian Libraries), conservation notes on the physical condition of Arch. G c.7 before digitisation. Archived campaign site. - [11] BBC News, 'Bodleian Library launches online Shakespeare appeal', 2 August 2012. - [12] Wikipedia, 'First Folio'. Tertiary source, consulted for print-run and printing-house detail; flagged for replacement with Anthony James West, 'The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book' (Oxford University Press) or W.W. Greg's bibliography. - [13] Wikipedia, 'Early texts of Shakespeare's works'. Tertiary source, consulted for the Jaggard/Blount/Aspley/Smethwick printing syndicate and compositor detail; flagged for replacement with a primary bibliographic study. - [14] Wikipedia, 'Droeshout portrait'. Tertiary source, consulted for engraving states; flagged for replacement with Folger Shakespeare Library technical notes. - [15] Web search result summary noting the Bodleian holds two First Folio copies, one shelfmarked Arch. G c.7. The identity and shelfmark of the second copy could not be independently confirmed from the sources consulted; see notes_for_editor. - [16] Wikimedia Commons, File:Bodleian First Folio Tragedy of Julius Caesar (cropped).jpg, licence and credit metadata. - [17] Wikipedia, 'Ben Jonson folios', and Folger Shakespeare Library, 'The Other First Folio' (Collation blog), on the 1616 Jonson Workes as precedent for publishing plays in folio format. - [18] Britannica Kids / general reference summary of Heminges and Condell's dedicatory epistle and Ben Jonson's commendatory poems. Tertiary; flagged for replacement with the First Folio's front matter itself or a scholarly edition. - [19] Lives of the First World War (Imperial War Museums), life story of Gladwyn Maurice Revell Turbutt. - [20] Magdalen College Oxford War Memorial, biography of Gladwyn Maurice Revell Turbutt, BA, JP. - [21] Wikipedia, 'Falconer Madan', for his role as Bodleian sub-librarian in 1905 and later Bodley's Librarian. - [22] Wikipedia, 'Strickland Gibson', for his role as the Bodleian's bindings specialist. - [23] Wikipedia, 'Edward Nicholson (librarian)', for E.W.B. Nicholson's tenure as Bodley's Librarian, 1882-1912, during the 1906 subscription. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.