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 *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1115 ***
 
 
+Executive Director's Notes:
+
+In addition to the notes below, and so you will *NOT* think all
+the spelling errors introduced by the printers of the time have
+been corrected, here are the first few lines of Hamlet, as they
+are presented herein:
+
+  Barnardo. Who's there?
+  Fran. Nay answer me: Stand & vnfold
+your selfe
+
+   Bar. Long liue the King
+
+***
+
+As I understand it, the printers often ran out of certain words
+or letters they had often packed into a "cliche". . .this is the
+original meaning of the term cliche. . .and thus, being unwilling
+to unpack the cliches, and thus you will see some substitutions
+that look very odd. . .such as the exchanges of u for v, v for u,
+above. . .and you may wonder why they did it this way, presuming
+Shakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner. . . .
+
+The answer is that they MAY have packed "liue" into a cliche at a
+time when they were out of "v"'s. . .possibly having used "vv" in
+place of some "w"'s, etc.  This was a common practice of the day,
+as print was still quite expensive, and they didn't want to spend
+more on a wider selection of characters than they had to.
+
+You will find a lot of these kinds of "errors" in this text, as I
+have mentioned in other times and places, many "scholars" have an
+extreme attachment to these errors, and many have accorded them a
+very high place in the "canon" of Shakespeare.  My father read an
+assortment of these made available to him by Cambridge University
+in England for several months in a glass room constructed for the
+purpose.  To the best of my knowledge he read ALL those available
+. . .in great detail. . .and determined from the various changes,
+that Shakespeare most likely did not write in nearly as many of a
+variety of errors we credit him for, even though he was in/famous
+for signing his name with several different spellings.
+
+So, please take this into account when reading the comments below
+made by our volunteer who prepared this file:  you may see errors
+that are "not" errors. . . .
+
+So. . .with this caveat. . .we have NOT changed the canon errors,
+here is the Project Gutenberg Etext of Shakespeare's The first
+Part of Henry the Sixt.
+
+Michael S. Hart
+Project Gutenberg
+Executive Director
+
+
+***
+
+
+Scanner's Notes: What this is and isn't.  This was taken from
+a copy of Shakespeare's first folio and it is as close as I can
+come in ASCII to the printed text.
+
+The elongated S's have been changed to small s's and the
+conjoined ae have been changed to ae.  I have left the spelling,
+punctuation, capitalization as close as possible to the
+printed text.  I have corrected some spelling mistakes (I have put
+together a spelling dictionary devised from the spellings of the
+Geneva Bible and Shakespeare's First Folio and have unified
+spellings according to this template), typo's and expanded
+abbreviations as I have come across them.  Everything within
+brackets [] is what I have added.  So if you don't like that
+you can delete everything within the brackets if you want a
+purer Shakespeare.
+
+Another thing that you should be aware of is that there are textual
+differences between various copies of the first folio.  So there may
+be differences (other than what I have mentioned above) between
+this and other first folio editions.  This is due to the printer's
+habit of setting the type and running off a number of copies and
+then proofing the printed copy and correcting the type and then
+continuing the printing run.  The proof run wasn't thrown away but
+incorporated into the printed copies.  This is just the way it is.
+The text I have used was a composite of more than 30 different
+First Folio editions' best pages.
+
+David Reed
+
+======================================================================
+
+
 
 
 The First Part of Henry the Fourth