Jonson First Folio copies in the Meisei Shakespeare Library

Especially by virtue of its holdings of Ben Jonson folios, the Meisei Shakespeare Library in Tokyo is also a Jonson library.Its value as such is barely recognized. 1 The main aim of the present note is to open a window onto the Meisei's Jonson folio collection by presenting a preliminary description of its fourteen copies of the1616 edition, and thereby to complement the existing accounts of this landmark edition.The collection was built mainly in the period 1975-93, during the high final years of the Japanese economic miracle.The driving force behind it was Mitsuo Kodama, president of Meisei University from 1978 to 1995.