Shakespeare's First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley

In Shakespeare's First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley, Jason Scott-Warren provides a lively account of the first person known to have purchased a printed book by Shakespeare, the popular narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593). He argues convincingly that even a fleeting encounter with a book in a shop window constitutes a mode of paratextual engagement that challenges “the tidy distinction between reading and book use” (viii). The list of about five hundred titles Stonley amassed in his extraordinary book collection, which was inventoried with his other London townhouse belongings when this Exchequer clerk for Elizabeth I was incarcerated for embezzlement in 1597, shows how “books work to link people, places, and things” (ix). Because Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is not among Stonley's “two dozen books known to have survived today,” we lack marginalia that might have indicated whether or not he read the poem closely (14)....