The wonderful literary critic Jonathan Bate, best known as a Shakespearean, is writing a book on six favorite authors, including Nabokov, and wants to link each of them to their love of Shakespeare, and especially by their own personal copy of Shakespeare. Nabokov had a cheap one-volume edition, and a Folger edition of Hamlet, but I also saw a three or four-volume edition whose size was, I think, sextodecimo (twice the size of Kinbote's 32mo Timon Afinsken) in vermilion soft leather in an exhibition at the Montreux Palace in 1999. Does anybody know any details of this edition (which first Nabokov and then Véra seems to have kept in their rooms rather than in the rest of their disorganized library in Montreux) or its present whereabouts?
Brian Boyd
Shakespeare
The first thing that came to mind was reading through the Stephen Jay Parker article in The Garland Companion to Nabokov entitled Library in hope of something -- but nothing new under the sun.
But thanks for the information on Jonathan Bate. It will be interesting to read his take on Nabokov.