This is a beautifully judged book about books, impeccably researched yet wry and affectionate.

Jerry Brotton, Financial Times

Smith's account of the Folio's distinguished career is very nicely written and consistently entertaining and informative... It is the modern equivalent of a magic book, and Smith's own book does justice to that magic.

Times Higher Education

Emma Smith's book comes as a welcome corrective to the fascination with Shakespeare the man ... as it is the "biography" of something far more interesting: a book.

Stuart Kelly, Independent

I've been looking forward to Emma Smith's Shakespeare's First Folio ever since I heard her give a paper that asked, "can you actually read the First Folio?" It's that sort of arresting question that wouldn't occur to many other people that makes her scholarship so inventive and absorbing.

Jem Bloomfield, Times Higher Education, Summer Reads 2016

A charming, enlightening account, not so much of the origins, as of the fortunes over the years subsequently, of the great edition.

David Sexton, Evening Standard

Smith is one of the cleverest scholars around, but her academic weight is balanced with an accessible tone and wry humour.

Bristol Magazine

A marvelous bit of scholarship. Detailed without being dry, playful without being silly, it's a well-researched, thoroughly balanced account of this 'iconic book.'

The Oxford Culture Review

The book is well illustrated, and Smith writes with great style.

Ben Higgins, Review of English Studies

... offers a wealth of important information, fascinating episodes, and sophisticated critical insight. It will, therefore, be of great interest to a variety of scholars in different disciplines, with literary critics, cultural historians, and scholars of book history foremost among them.

José María Pérez Fernández, Bulletin of the Comediantes

[A] compassionate biography... a wonderful testimony to the 'worlds most expensive book' and the readers who keep it that way.

Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare Survey

This book is a very good read, a largely anecdotal but always entertaining account of copies of the Shakespeare First Folio from their production in 1623 to the present ... the pleasure and instruction this book will bring to the casual bibliophile or the Shakespeare enthusiast.

Alan H. Nelson, Renaissance Quarterly

Smith's second book, Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, picks up where The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio leaves off, tracing different ways of interacting with the Folio owning, reading, forging, acting, collecting, and studying from the seventeenth century to our own time, and from Europe and America to Africa and Asia.

Kevin Curran, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

****

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph

A handsome tome, self-consciously relishing its book-self, while chronicling the fetishising of another. A fascinating read for any Shakespeare nerd.

Katy Hayes, Irish Independent

Impressively learned ... [an] excellent book.

Michael Dirda, Washington Post

[Smith] reanimates, in narrative style, the histories of this book, paying close attention to the details of individual copies now located around the world.

Richard Lofthouse, QUAD

In Shakespeare's First Folio, Emma Smith, a little over-cautiously, comments that "to collect may always be to sacralize". Yet no other literary book is treated with quite the same religiosity as the First Folio.

Peter Holland, TLS

[A] magnificent and thoroughly enjoyable account of the changes in the [First Folio's] fortunes.

Peter Holland, Times Literary Supplement

Smith's study is a trove of such accidents and contingencies, many belonging to the decades-indeed, more than a century-before the First Folio became an importantly old book, when it was simply an aging one.

Catherine Nicholson, New York Review