Shakespeares Last Folio: Tragedie, Phantasie & Pœsie
Compiled, Edited & Designed by Ron Koster
Published by Psymon (Ottawa, 2016)
NEW & IMPROVED FOR 2019! While the overall text for this ebook has not changed, there was one aspect of my original published version that always rather bothered me about it -- the fonts used in it. While those third-party fonts were indeed considered to be “historical” fonts, nevertheless they looked rather like “new” versions of “old” fonts, they looked too cleaned-up, too perfected, in a way, they just didn't seem to have the right look to give my ebook the antiquarian aura that I was hoping for.
And so what did I do? I decided to fix that problem myself, by learning all the ins-and-outs of type design, and created an entire family of
historically-accurate, genuinely “authentic” period fonts, based on the rather obscure (and in some ways unusual) metal types of the 16th-century London printer, John Alde, complete with numerous ligatures and other OpenType features.
NOTE: Do you like my fonts? I'm not trying to spam this forum, because I'm not asking for anything here. On the contrary, I'm just offering everyone a tangential freebie to go right along with this publication.
Feel free to use my fonts in your own ebooks, or anywhere else you'd like! I've released them under the SIL Open Font License, so you can use them however you may wish -- and I would be just delighted if you did (I'd love to hear from you, too, if you should choose to do so). You can unzip and pull the fonts straight from this ebook -- I did not subset them, you're getting the complete fonts inside (including roman, italic, smallcaps, blackletter and decorative initials) -- or if you want to be sure to get the latest version(s) of them, please visit...
http://www.psymon.com/fonts/alde.html
I also gave my book a new cover, too. While I did really quite like the old cover (with the three Macbethean witches doing their thing), it didn't really give a sense for what was contained within the book and could have been somewhat misleading, and so while the new cover is, I suppose, a little more sedate in comparison, I did feel that it reflected the contents and design of the book's innards far better.
And now, back to my original description for this ebook...
----------------------------
An illustrated “neo-facsimile” edition of a selection of Shakespeare’s greatest poems and plays, meticulously transcribed from the First Folio and other early editions, maintaining faithful textual accuracy to the original sources while at the same time adapting them to the flowable text format of ebooks, without losing the mystique and visual appeal of early printed books and period typography.
Six of the Bard’s most famous plays are included...
- The Tragedy of Macbeth
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
- The Winters Tale
- The Tragedy of King Lear
- The Tempest
...along with the best of his poems...
- The Rape of Lucrece (plus Thomas Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece)
- Venus and Adonis
- The Sonnets (plus A Lover’s Complaint)
Of no small significance is the inclusion within this volume of Robert Chester’s
Loves Martyr, here also reproduced in a brand-new transcription (and adaptation to ebook format) from the original source material, and presented in its entirety as a “book within a book.” This highly-unusual, obscure little work is a beautiful, magical, mystical monograph first published in 1602, which features a dialogue between Nature, the Phœnix, and the Turtle Dove; a treatise on the birth, life and death of King Arthur; along with supplemental verses by William Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, and others.
(Note: For reference, "Ron Koster" and "Psymon" are one and the same. 
For details on copyright of this ebook and the various works contained therein, please refer to the copyright notice within the book itself.)
------------------
VERSION HISTORY:
Ron Koster - Shakespeares Last Folio 100.epub (initial iBooks version, not uploaded to MR)
Ron Koster - Shakespeares Last Folio 101.epub (first MR upload from 2016-10-31, with 85 downloads)
Ron Koster - Shakespeares Last Folio 102.epub (revised MR upload on 2016-11-16, with a variety of spelling corrections and other textual emendations throughout the book, along with a few subtle design improvements, with 453 downloads)
Ron Koster - Shakespeares Last Folio 200.epub (current upload on 2019-01-14, with the substitution of my own fonts in place of the previous third-party fonts)
This work is assumed to be in the Life+70 public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. Copyright laws differ throughout the world, and it may still be under copyright in some countries. Before downloading, please check your country's copyright laws.
If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this work.
To report a copyright violation you can
contact us here.