Is that The Riverside Shakespeare. which comes in at a mere 1,927 pages and weighs more than a couple of kilos?
Which illustrates a major issue with some copies of the First Folio, which also has a bearing on their bindings. Collectors prefer their copies to be complete and in good condition. So in the past dealers would often cobble together a ‘complete’ copy from several imperfect ones. That necessarily involved rebinding them. Quite a few of the fragmentary leftover copies survive.
An actor I know owns a Second Folio (or part of one I think). It’s nowhere near the value of a First Folio but still quite valuable. He was once entertaining his high school drama teacher and was showing him the book, which the teacher was quite awed to be in the presence of. They were discussing one of the plays and the teacher said something about one of the lines. The actor said, “hey, that’s a good point; let me make a note of that” and picked up pen and made a movement like he was going to write something in the margin of the page. He said his teacher nearly had a heart attack.
Folios, pshaw, I would settle for no less than quartos. Especially the ones with flaws.
I think the metric system has you confused. You should want a foli because it’s larger than a quart. Alive, alive-o.
Can you get a discount if instead of a quarto, you buy a whole gallono?
Not much of one. The OP was about getting all four folios, which would be two gallonos - and look how expensive that was!
For the curious, quartos and folios refer to the way books were printed in Shakespeare’s time. Printing presses were slow and cumbersome, so multiple pages were printed at a time on large sheets. In a quarto, four pages were printed on one side, and four on the other, then the result was folded twice and trimmed along the folds, creating a “gathering” of 8 pages on four leaves. The gatherings for the whole book were then sewn into bindings.
As @APB mentiones, whoever buys these books won’t be getting the original bindings from Shakespeare’s time, but they’ll be getting the original folios as printed in 1623.
In a folio, two pages on each side were printed and folded in a similar way. Several of these 4-page sets were inserted into each other to form a gathering, which again was sewn into a binding.
In modern times (or at least recently), most products are printed on webs (large rolls of paper) which lay a bunch of pages out on both sides. The webs are formed (creased) and folded several times, and cut and trimmed into the finished product (which may be a broadsheed, a “quarterfold”, a tabloid or a signature for some type of binding).
Which is to say, the basic process has not changed in over half a millennium. The way the paper goes into the press and the way the impresssions go onto the paper is designed to be faster and more flexible, but the layout is the same.