---
title: Shakespeare's First Folio Found in Saint-Omer
description: The story of the Saint-Omer copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, catalogued for two centuries as a worthless eighteenth-century reprint before a librarian look...
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-08-26T18:00:00.000Z
updated: 2026-08-26T20:01:33.882Z
canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/shakespeare-s-first-folio-found-in-saint-omer
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-old-paper-with-cursive-writing-on-a-vintage-desk-capturing-a-17323635.png
categories: Literary Culture
content_type: Book Review
region: Europe
publication: The Quantum of Light
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

Not every rare book survives by being guarded. Some survive by being ignored. A copy of Shakespeare's First Folio sat on an open shelf in the public library of Saint-Omer, a small town in northern France, for roughly two hundred years, catalogued as a battered and unremarkable eighteenth-century reprint. Nobody stole it. Nobody hid it in a vault. It simply sat there, its cover missing, several pages gone, until a librarian pulled it down in 2014 to check whether it might suit an exhibition, and realised it was not a reprint at all.

## A Book Built to Rescue Other Books

The First Folio itself exists because two actors did not want their dead friend's work to disappear. William Shakespeare died in 1616 having seen barely half his plays reach print, and those that had were often taken from rough, error-ridden playhouse copies. Seven years later, his fellow actors and King's Men shareholders John Heminges and Henry Condell gathered together 36 plays into a single large-format volume, working from a mixture of manuscripts, prompt books and printed quartos, and had it printed in London in 1623 under the title Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Eighteen of those plays, among them Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest and Twelfth Night, had never appeared in print before. Without Heminges and Condell's volume, roughly half of Shakespeare's surviving work would most likely not exist at all.

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