The Proofreader of the First Folio
A Novel of the 1623 Print Shop

About this book:

In the fog-choked alleys of 1623 London, the Jaggard print shop races to assemble the book that will save Shakespeare from oblivion—the First Folio. Fifty-one-year-old proofreader Nicholas Crane has spent three decades coaxing sense from lead type, but when a pristine fair copy vanishes from a locked chest and a seditious manuscript appears in its place, he realizes the press is not merely printing a book. It is being weaponized. The substituted leaves contain lines the King's censors ordered burned: secrets of mutiny, colonization, and a wizard who looks uncomfortably like a disgraced courtier. If those sheets reach the binders, the Folio burns, the Jaggards hang for treason, and Shakespeare's legacy dies in the churchyard flames.

With only days before the next forme must lock, Crane turns detective in a trade where every compositor has ink in his blood and every bookseller a ledger of grudges. His clues are a footprint in expensive Spanish leather, a grain of French mustard seed, and a watermark that whispers of Frankfurt paper mills. From the damp vaults beneath the Barbican to the taverns where players drink with spies, Crane navigates a world where a turned letter can mean the rack, and the difference between *thou* and *thon* might hide a conspiracy. The players Heminge and Condell demand their property; the Stationers' Company circles like wolves; and somewhere in the smoky pressroom, a thief waits for the press to run.

Rich with the stench of lampblack, the rhythm of the great wooden press, and the tactile obsession of men who measure their lives in reams and formes, *The Proofreader of the First Folio* is a literary thriller that makes bibliography breathless. Here is the birth of a secular bible—fought over by merchants, guarded by actors, and midwifed by a proofreader who knows that words, once cast in metal, cannot be recalled. For readers of *The Name of the Rose* and *A Dead Man in Deptford*, a mystery where the very text is the crime scene.