Today in 1644, Edward Dering died. On December 5, 1623, Dering noted in his account book the purchase of two copies of William Shakespeare's First Folio. It is the earliest recorded retail purchase of this collection of 36 of Shakespeare's plays.
On Dec. 5, 1623, a fashionable young man-about-town called Sir Edward Dering visited St. Paul’s Cross Churchyard, London’s main bookselling hub. There he bought two playbooks, a book in Latin and a book of Ben Jonson’s plays. He also bought two copies of a book that had only recently hit the shelves—a large, expensively-bound tome entitled “Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies.”
Dering has the distinguished claim of being the earliest recorded purchaser of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Published more than seven years after the bard’s death, the First Folio, as it is known today, constitutes a landmark in printing, a cornerstone of the Western canon and a monument to the writer’s singular genius. In her 2016 study “The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio,” Oxford literary scholar Emma Smith writes that although the book arrived without any fanfare, “it is hard to overstate the importance of this literary, cultural and commercial moment.” She adds that this book’s publication marked “the beginning of the extensive and expansive reception of Shakespeare.”