'When you hunt for First Folios for over a decade,' writes Eric Rasmussen, 'you can become a bit obsessed.' That doesn't even come close.
At first glance, The Shakespeare Thefts is a collection of witty and entertaining essays about how, since it was first published in 1623, the First Folio of Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies has attracted the attention of thieves and conmen; how copies of one of the most valuable books in the world (up to £4.3 million a pop) have been purloined over the centuries by a parade of petty crooks, dishonest relatives and dodgy dealers. And there can be few people better qualified to tell the story. For more than a decade Eric Rasmussen and his team have combined the forensic skills of CSI and the relentless determination of a Terminator to track down and record every detail of every surviving copy - 232 of them - for their 1,500-page Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue, to be published later this year.
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