For the last couple of years, I’ve had a bit of an obsession with finding examples of early printed books that aren’t available as open-access digital facsimiles. Why have I been thinking about this? It started off with some frustration that we have a slew of digital copies of (ahem) Shakespeare’s First Folio and of the Gutenberg Bible (25 copies!). Why do we have so many of those and none of…. of…. um…. And so I started looking. The more time I spent looking, the more frustrated I grew about what wasn’t available. How could it be that there were no open facsimiles of Sidney’s ridiculously important sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella? Or Tottel’s miscellany? Or one of the most popular English plays, Mucedorus? These are foundational works in the development of their genres. In some cases, they survive in only a very small number of understandably restricted copies. Shouldn’t…