A Collection of Early English Books: Reading in the Age of Shakespeare, presentation by Paul Chrzanowski

Book collector Paul Chrzanowski donated his collection of nearly 150 early English books to the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

The collection includes copies of the second and fourth folio editions of Shakespeare’s collected plays (1632 and 1685); plays extracted from the first and third folios; Robert Allott’s England’s Parnassus (1600) with Shakespeare excerpts; and a quarto play, Parts 2 and 3 of Henry the Sixth (1619).

The presentation did not focus on these works. Rather it introduced books on wide-ranging topics that illustrate readers’ interests at the time—highlighting from the collection books of importance, books of great rarity, books with special provenance, and oddities. This presentation explores “books that Shakespeare might have read.”

This event was co-sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America, the Book Club of California, and the American Trust for the British Library.