Note 312b — XIX—BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reading edition
On January 31, 1852, Collier announced in the Athenæum, that this copy, which had been purchased by him for thirty shillings, and bore on the outer cover the words ‘Tho. Perkins his Booke,’ was annotated throughout by a former owner in the middle of the seventeenth century. Shortly afterwards Collier published all the ‘essential’ manuscript readings in a volume entitled Notes and Emendations to the Plays of Shakespeare. Next year he presented the folio to the Duke of Devonshire. A warm controversy as to the date and genuineness of the corrections followed, but in 1859 all doubt as to their origin was set at rest by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton of the manuscript department of the British Museum, who in letters to the Times of July 2 and 16 pronounced all the manuscript notes to be recent fabrications in a simulated seventeenth-century hand.