These editions were primarily intended to be cheap and convenient, and read until worn out or repurposed as wrapping paper (or worse), rather than high quality objects kept in a library.

[11] In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's First Folio, Tara L. Lyons argues that this was partly due to the publisher, John Harrison's, desire to capitalize on the poems' association with Ovid: the Greek classics were sold in octavo, so printing Shakespeare's poetry in the same format would strengthen the association.

[12] Whatever the motivation, the move seems to have had the intended effect: Francis Meres, the first known literary critic to comment on Shakespeare, in his Palladis Tamia (1598), puts it thus: "the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends".

[15] The contents of the First Folio were compiled by John Heminges and Henry Condell;[16] the members of the Stationers Company who published the book were the booksellers Edward Blount and the father/son team of William and Isaac Jaggard.

"[18] Heminges and Condell emphasised that the Folio was replacing the earlier publications, which they characterised as "stol'n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors", asserting that Shakespeare's true words "are now offer'd to your view cured, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them."

[19] It is thought that the typesetting and printing of the First Folio was such a large job that the King's Men simply needed the capacities of the Jaggards' shop.

William Jaggard was old, infirm and blind by 1623, and died a month before the book went on sale; most of the work in the project must have been done by his son Isaac.

The First Folio's publishing syndicate also included two stationers who owned the rights to some of the individual plays that had been previously printed: William Aspley (Much Ado About Nothing and Henry IV, Part 2) and John Smethwick (Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet).

[24] Ben Jonson wrote a preface to the folio with this poem addressed "To the Reader" facing the Droeshout portrait engraving: This Figure, that thou here ſeeſt put, It vvas for gentle Shakeſpeare cut; Wherein the Grauer had a ſtrife vvith Nature, to out-doo the life : O, could he but haue dravvne his vvit As vvell in braſſe, as he hath hit His face; the Print vvould then ſurpaſſe All, that vvas euer vvrit in braſſe.

As far as modern scholarship has been able to determine,[25] the First Folio texts were set into type by five compositors, with different spelling habits, peculiarities, and levels of competence.

Their shares in typesetting the pages of the Folio break down like this: Compositor "E" was most likely one John Leason, whose apprenticeship contract dated only from 4 November 1622.

W. W. Greg has argued that Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or "book-holder" (prompter) of the King's Men, did the actual proofreading of the manuscript sources for the First Folio.

The Folio was typeset and bound in "sixes"—3 sheets of paper, taken together, were folded into a booklet-like quire or gathering of 6 leaves, 12 pages.

[e] In terms of purchasing power, "a bound folio would be about forty times the price of a single play and represented almost two months' wages for an ordinary skilled worker.

[40] The First Folio is one of the most valuable printed books in the world: a copy sold at Christie's in New York in October 2001 made $6.16 million hammer price (then £3.73m).

[41] In October 2020, a copy sold by Mills College at Christie's fetched a price of $10 million,[42] making it the most expensive work of literature ever auctioned.

[46] On 11 July 2008, it was reported that a copy stolen from Durham University, England, in 1998 had been recovered after being submitted for valuation at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

[47] Although the book, once the property of John Cosin the Bishop of Durham, was returned to the library, it had been mutilated and was missing its cover and title page.

[49] Fifty-three-year-old Raymond Scott received an eight-year prison sentence for handling stolen goods, but was acquitted of the theft itself.

[50] A July 2010 BBC programme about the affair, Stealing Shakespeare, portrayed Scott as a fantasist and petty thief.

[52] In November 2014, a previously unknown First Folio was found in a public library in Saint-Omer, Pas-de-Calais in France, where it had lain for 200 years.

[53][54] The name "Neville", written on the first surviving page, may indicate that it once belonged to Edward Scarisbrick, who fled England due to anti-Catholic repression, attended the Jesuit Saint-Omer College, and was known to use that alias.

[30] In March 2016, Christie's announced that a previously unrecorded copy once owned by 19th-century collector Sir George Augustus Shuckburgh-Evelyn would be auctioned on 25 May 2016.

[55] According to the Antiques Trade Gazette, an American collector paid £1,600,000 for it; the buyer also successfully bid on copies of the second, third, and fourth folios.