Collected Works Shakespeare, William (et al.): Shakespeares Last Folio. v.2.00. 14 January, 2019

[Psymon]

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.

[doubleshuffle]

What an amazing labour of love! Thank you very much!

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

What an amazing labour of love! Thank you very much!

Thank you so much (in return), I'm really glad you liked it.

[Psymon]

Like my hanging brackets (parentheses) and quotation marks? In the attached screenshot here, you can see an example of the former near the beginning of the left-hand page (4th line down), and several examples of the latter in various places on both pages (for both flush-left lines as well as indented lines). My book also has hanging apostrophes, too, in various cases where they appeared at the beginning of a line.

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.

[Psymon]

I'm sooooooooo genuinely surprised that I didn't get more comments/feedback on my book, after all those months of work.

[doubleshuffle]

Welcome to the club. There isn't a lot of response usually. It's the Internet after all...

I haven't checked yet how you did your hanging brackets and quotation marks. I think I did it in a poetry book once and used different indentations. Did you do it any differently?

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

Welcome to the club. There isn't a lot of response usually. It's the Internet after all...

Yeah, I suppose. It's not that I expected a deluge of responses or anything, of course, but heck, browsing through the books that others have made here, at the risk of stepping on anyone's toes, well, I've seen the odd post of a book that has 100 comments or something, and so I take a look at the book and it looks like little more than a plain text file, and I can't understand what all the hubbub is about.

I haven't checked yet how you did your hanging brackets and quotation marks. I think I did it in a poetry book once and used different indentations. Did you do it any differently?

Yeah, basically -- that's the only way to do it, of course. I just gave my paragraphs a 0.4em left margin, which is almost unnoticeable, and that was enough that I could then make adjustments for if/when a line began with a quotation mark, apostrophe or parenthesis.

I know it's no big deal, in a way -- it's not like I discovered the secret to the universe or anything -- but even still I was rather pleased with myself when the idea occurred to me, and even more pleased when it actually worked out quite well. That's a nice "feature" that one sees in print books, of course, but that I hadn't seen anyone strive to do in ebooks -- although obviously I'd never looked at yours! Maybe I should check your books out, have a look at your designs (regardless of the content) for further inspiration.

Thanks for the reply!

[doubleshuffle]

If you're looking for fancy formatting ideas, you should get books done by GrannyGrump, pynch or Jellby. They are the masters, I just plod along.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

If you're looking for fancy formatting ideas, you should get books done by GrannyGrump, pynch or Jellby. They are the masters, I just plod along.

Awesome! Thanks! I'll definitely check theirs out -- they've helped me before with coding questions I've had in the past, and it'll be cool to see their work. Thanks for the recommendations!

[GrannyGrump]

I just saw this posted and downloaded it. I must say, this is beautiful! You have some very lovely formatting in this.

Thank you.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

I just saw this posted and downloaded it. I must say, this is beautiful! You have some very lovely formatting in this.

Well, that's not very grumpy at all, Granny! Thank you so much, your kind words mean a lot to me.

[kansaskyle]

@Psymon - I just found this thread, and I think the book looks great!

I like the artistic touches with the scroll work at the top, the leafs in the table of contents, the pictures, etc.

Thank you for all your hard work!

[Psymon]

Thank you, Kyle, for your kind words! So happy you enjoyed my book!

[Psymon]

Hey, everyone out there in ebook land! I just made a MAJOR change to my book -- please see the preamble that I just added to my book description for more info! It's been a long, arduous past few years in accomplishing what I'd hoped to -- and I'm delighted to be at this end of things and able to share that with you all.

And I do genuinely hope that what I've done will be of possible benefit to some of you other ebook publishers out there as well! Please do let me know what you think -- I'd really love to hear!

[Psymon]

Hilarious. Looking at just those screenshots I posted (along with the new version of my book) I suddenly see some more things that could be improved on re my fonts (plus one very tiny issue re my book design).

Ah, sigh -- the trials and tribulations of type design (never mind ebook design)! If I've learned anything about creating fonts, it does seem that there's always, endlessly room for improvement on what you think you've "finished."

In that regard, I may post another update to my book (in particular with those font improvements) in a while, once I've fixed those things up (and looked for any other possible issues more closely). In that regard, epubs are definitely a good way for testing out ones font designs, actually.

EDIT/PS... In that regard, I'd be very grateful if perchance anyone out there does notice any problems re kerning or anything else in my fonts. I know that type design isn't the subject matter of this forum, but in a way my font projects and ebook projects have all gone hand-in-hand, so I hope that's not TOO off-topic to ask.