The other is “The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays” (1888) by Ignatius Donnelly, a Wisconsin politician and author of the pseudoscience classic “Atlantis: The Antediluvian World” (1882). One is Charlton Hinman’s “The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare” (1963), which used a machine - the now famous Hinman collator - to gain new understanding of the 1623 volume by comparing pages from multiple copies. Much of this excellent book tracks what individual copies of the First Folio meant to various “owners, dealers, forgers, collectors, actors” and “scholars.” But in the chapter titled “Decoding,” Smith zeroes in on two groundbreaking volumes in Shakespeare studies, both obsessed with numbers.
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