New Discoveries about the Saint-Omer Folio: The Signification of the PS Stamp

Since the discovery of a Shakespeare First Folio in Saint-Omer (in northern France), in a city library that had integrated the library of the former English Jesuit College of St Omers at the French Revolution, scholars have been speculating about Catholic interest in Shakespeare. In an article published in May 2015 in Etudes Episteme, Line Cottegnies and Gisele Venet studied the annotations in the Folio and described, among other things, the curious marking of the book, the letters PS hand-pressed repeatedly throughout at regular intervals. Since then, other similarly-marked books, six in total to date, have emerged in the Saint-Omer rare books collection, and allow us to suggest that the letters PS stand for “Praefectus/i Studiorum”, and that the marked books were placed in a Prefect of Studies’ reserve. This short article mainly aims at describing the PS-marked books that have been identified. We suggest that the marking indicates that PS-marked books were kept separate from the main communal library. This raises in turn some interesting questions about the juxtaposition of the Folio with the other PS-marked books, and this note offers some tentative suggestions to try and explain why it was thus withdrawn from circulation and placed in a reserve or special collection of a Prefect of Studies.