Quartos Going Digital

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23438755-5001028,00.html

Two libraries in Britain and the US plan to reproduce online all 75 editions of William Shakespeare's plays printed in the quarto format before the year 1641.

This is one of those projects that makes me wish I was a grad student someplace, just spending all day combing through every last page looking at the handwritten notes in the margins.  It's not just that they're scanning the quartos - the British Library did that with theirs back in 2004 - it's that each quarto is different, and they are scanning them all.

It's funny that the article says Shakespeare wrote "at least 37 plays."  I thought the generally held number now was 38 - or aren't they counting Two Noble Kinsmen, you think?