Cambridge

Shakespeare's Plays or Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies by William Shakespeare was first published by Jaggard & Blount in London in 1623. What is now called the First Folio was in fact the first collection of plays written by William Shakespeare. The First Folio is distinguished by an elaborate title page, frontispiece with first-state portrait, complete edition with leaves intact, containing Troilus and Cressida and its prologue, Romeo and Juliet ending on Gg. Roman and italic text types, cursive for headings, various larger romans and cursives in preliminaries. Text in double columns, 66 lines, bold headlines and catchwords, pages box-ruled, woodcut headpieces and tailpieces and initials. The first authorized edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare and in terms of editorial theory the closest we have or are likely to have to any final published text authorized by the author, in the sense that it is the published text authorized on the author's death by his friends and closest colleagues, such as John Heminges and Henry Condell, the people who performed his plays on stage.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is rated as Arthur Conan Doyle's best full-length Sherlock Holmes story. Set in Devon it pits Sherlock Holmes and his faithful assistant, Dr. Watson, against a deadly adversary. The specter of the giant hound that is said to haunt the moor provides a sinister undertone to Holmes' investigations into the sudden death of Sir Charles Baskerville and his attempts to protect Sir Baskerville's heir, Sir Henry. Fast-paced and brilliantly plotted, The Hound of the Baskervilles is a brilliant example of the classic detective story.

Dubliners depicts middle-class life in Dublin at the start of the twentieth century. Themes within the stories include the disappointments of childhood, the frustrations of adolescence, and the importance of adolescent awakening. James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years of struggle with publishers, resisting literary innovation and their demands to remove inappropriate words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. When James Joyce signed his first publishing contract for the book he already knew its literary worth and to alter it in any way would retard the course of civilisation in Ireland. James Joyce's aim was to tell the truth, to create a work of art that would reflect everyday life in Ireland at the turn of the last century and by rejecting euphemism, reveal to the Irish the unromantic reality the recognition of which would lead to the spiritual liberation of his country. Each of the fifteen stories offers a glimpse of the lives of ordinary Dubliners such as a death, an encounter, an opportunity not taken, a memory rekindled and collectively they paint a portrait of a nation. Considered at the time as a literary experiment, Dubliners contains moments of joy, fear, grief, love and loss, which combine to form one of the most complete depictions of a city ever written, and the stories remain as refreshingly original and surprising in this century as they did in the last.