Letterpress Shakespeare voucher

Because, apparently, I've bought the occasional limited edition - I make it nine, spread over 11 years - I'm now rewarded/tempted (delete as appropriate: I thought of including the third option of "punished" but that would be plain ungrateful, though I may possibly turn ungrateful yet!) with a voucher for £50 toward the cost of any chosen volume of the Letterpress Shakespeare. Given that I'll not be the only recipient, there may be a need for a support group here, though whether it should operate in the direction of encouraging participants to make use of the voucher, with or without a prior firm resolve that the volume they use it on should be the only one they ever buy, or should help us all to resist the FS blandishment I can't quite decide. I had resolved on leaving the series quite alone, but it does look very lovely, and £50 is £50 and not to be sneezed at. An expiry date of July 31st for the voucher means there are six months in which ten minutes of weakness at any time could suffice for the placing of an order, unless I take radical action and destroy the thing. Have I any fellow sufferers from insidious temptation yet?

I also received the £50 voucher, together with a beautifully produced pack of cards & envelopes. Each card bears a Shakespearian quotation on the front. I already have four Letterpress Shakespeares, but I can't afford the whole set. So the question arises where should one stop. I don't plan on buying any more - but the cards are very nice.

Don't they dare send me a voucher... or next thing everyone know I will be reporting my growing collections of those... My self-control when books are involved is non-existent.

The FS have just added four new titles to the Letterpress Shakespeare series -
- Loves Labours Lost
- Comedy of Errors
- Merry Wives of Windsor
- Two Gentlemen of Verona
Each limited to 1000 copies and priced at £1180 for the four volumes.
The £50 voucher will not make a huge dent in that price!

> 3 I echo those sentiments, especially given my special interest in Shakespeare. So far I have managed to restrain myself and only buy two of these volumes (Hamlet and King Lear), but The Tempest and Twelfth Night keep calling to me like the daughters of Achelous...

...but then surely I will need Macbeth...and A Midsummer Night's Dream...and Henry IV Part I...and Julius Caesar...and Romeo and Juliet...and As You Like It...and Much Ado About Nothing...and and and and, oh the list will go on!

"The Siren waits thee, singing song for song".

>5 Conte_Mosca: I collect Shakespeare. I need a very little push to go down that road... so I am resisting.

>4 wcarter:
Considering that these never go on sale, 50 is 50 - better than 0. :)

Four new Letterpress Shakespeare, the first blog entry from Mr. Blundell in months, and yet still no word on the Thomas Gray poems illustrated by Blake. I'm actually starting to lose interest in it, and might move on to other large (non-Folio) purchases.

>7 menteith: Ah, the year is young: as soon as we were told that publication was being delayed until 2013 I was resigned to being allowed to place my order, with luck, at some unguessable time before the end of June. I'll certainly not be disappointed, though, if our resident FS mole takes note of your wavering intention and passes word up the chain of command that the Gray volume had better be the next LE to appear.

Hope I see one of those vouchers! I'll be glad when this series is over so I can unlock a big chunk of my book budget. Shakespeare is a big factor in the deficit in my budget, so I'll take any help I can get.

I know this is a difficult decision to take. I only have one edition: Macbeth and I have it stored in the solander box. If I did have more I would put the solander boxes in storage. There is no reason to get rid of them but I do agree with you they are a bit of hassle.

Are you buying them secondhand or from FS?

Well, thank you FS! I too have now received the £50 voucher and the very attractive set of cards and envelopes with Shakespearian quotations. I like especially the magnetic clasp...

Yes! *insert happy face* I have also received a £50 Shakespeare voucher but then without any of the other goodies Drasvola just mentioned. Anyway, I have just firmly promised myself not to buy any of these fancy good looking delux Shakespeare books. Nice books... No no. Resist! I would otherwise buy all of them and I would require a second mortgage. Better swiftly burn this voucher.

On reflection there's decisive truth for me in Herbert Farjeon's observation in a note on his Nonesuch text, that "the modernisation of orthography, the innovations in punctuation, and the abandonment of the expressive parenthesis and capitalisation, have slurred the authentic accent of the original". I think, then, that I can be trusted from henceforth to let my voucher grow stale, and I'll remain faithful to my four-volume New Nonesuch, while not quite ruling out the seven volume original should I ever be stuck for a good use to which to put the odd thousand pounds or so.

"After the old text, has not the modern something of the flatness of soda-water after champagne? Does not much of the life and spring of the words seem to have vanished 'into thin air'? And can we look forward with complacence to the day when Shakespeare will be so modernised on the printed page that all the English-speaking world will read him in Nu Spelin and Nu Punctuashun?"

There's a thought, though mercifully hard to imagine in letterpress.

In Australia I received a $AU100 (£64) voucher, but as they charge more for all FS books over here, I guess that is fair.
I also have no intention of heading down the slippery slope of Letterpress Shakespeare, but if I was to do so, I would look at the secondhand market where fine versions of these books are regularly appearing a half price.

>16 wcarter: If you ever come across fine versions of the Letterpress Shakespeare in the UK for half price, hook me up! I regularly keep an eye out for these (I check all the usual places, Amazone, Abebooks, Ardis at least once a week) and have not once come across any of these that heavily discounted.

So seriously, if you do come across them that cheaply, let me know. I would be very grateful :-)

> 17
Michael,
Ardis has quite a few at US$295 at present. This is well below half the Australian new price of US$800.
In fact there are 22 different editions on Abe listed for below US$400.
I merely seached Abe for "Letterpress Shakespeare Folio Society".

>18 wcarter: I knew the pricing differential for Australians was high, but did not realisenit was that high! I see your point - if I was in Australia I too would seek secondary market options. Is the Aus$ price really $800? That is over £530, compared to £250 in the UK.

As it is, the cheapest Ardis has on offer at the moment in the UK is £182.90 for a few slipcased volumes, and £240 for solander boxed versions. Those prices are not particularly attractive, given I can pay £250 new (for most of the volumes I want), and possibly qualify for a free box set too - or £200 with the voucher. There is no doubt though that if I came across the titles I want at half price (£125, or US$195) on the secondary market, I would snap them up!

>19 Conte_Mosca:
The Letterpress Shakespeare in Australia are AU$795 (US$818, £508) for the low limitation editions and AU$695 (US$715, £445) for the higher limitation editions. Plus AU$50 postage!
The unfair price discrimination against Australian FS members has been discussed in this forum in the past extensively, so I won't reopen that argument, but you can understand the frustration with the FS we have in the antipodes.
I was in London last August and on visiting the MR spent up big on innumerable FS editions, including several LEs, and then posted them back to myself. I calculated that I had saved myself about $1000 thus justifying my extensive purchases.

The difficulty here seems to be which edition to choose; the slipcase one or the solander box with commentary?

19 > Do you have to give your name in order to shop? I am really curious how the MR works.

>22 eatanygoodbooks:
I only have limited experience with the MR, having visited once every two years for about 20 years, but you certainly do not have to give your name in order to enter or shop.
It is actually a very small shop in an inconspicuous back street, with an entrance off a side lane. There is a well worn couch on which to lounge and peruse books, and a couple of chairs, and very helpful staff. The single room is surrounded by ceiling high bookcases, and there is usually a selection of warehouse leftover books on a shelf at the back that sell for about £5-10. Examples of every book FS has in print (including the LEs - lettered copies rather than numbered) are available to examine and buy. Some out of print LEs (eg. Candide) were also available to examine when I was there .
If you are a member you can give your name and they will add your purchases to their database about you so that they can build up their profile on you and give you better reward vouchers as a dedicated FS addict. They will also warn you if you have already bought the book and try to order it again.
My purchases were so extensive that they let me have half a dozen warehouse find books for no charge.
My bill from the post office a block away (it took three trips to carry all the book purchases from the MR to the shop) was huge, but the post office also sells boxes, bags and packaging appropriate to the needs of an expatriate bibliophile.
All I have to do now is read everything I bought from the MR, as well as those I bought in the nearby second hand shops.

>23 wcarter: I like your style. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing in a big way!

Unfortunately the warehouse leftover shelves are no more. They were removed (the books, not the shelves!) in October last year and whilst the books were wheeled out for the one day Christmas Mince Pie Extravaganza, they have not been seen since.

As for LEs, I believe they state that they have a copy in the MR of every LE published since the formal LE programme commenced in 2001. I haven't validated that, but I have often sought out an out of print LE there to peruse before making the plunge in the secondary market, and have not yet been disappointed. The exception may be the Letterpress Shakespeare where I suspect they only have a representative sample given the shelf space required (they display the solander boxed versions, not the slipcased versions)