It'll look great in one of those $100m Manhattan apartments

Frontispiece of the opening scene of The Tempest scanned from Rowe's 1709 edition. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For The Bard's 450th, The UK Folio Society is rolling out a limited edition of the complete works that'll set you back $17,500. Spears, the wealth management magazine, wonders if here lies the future of books:

Anyway, the existence of this remarkable beast seems to bear out one of the sensible predictions that has been made about the future of books (or 'Future Of Books', as one imagines the portentous capitalisation in those endless discussions and symposia). That is, the smart money has predicted a vanishing middle-ground: the ease, cheapness and portability of digital editions will eclipse paperback and some hardback sales.

The paperback's selling point as a technology is that it was, as Allen Lane brilliantly recognised when he launched Penguins on to the world, the easiest and cheapest and most portable delivery mechanism for text. Now it is not.

But that doesn't mean that dead-tree books will disappear. Rather, it's plausibly suggested, the digital age will throw extra attention on book-as-object rather than book-as-delivery-mechanism: we'll see the physical book, where its materiality is to the fore, as heirloom, as art object, as fetish. Here is this prediction lavishly embodied. At one end of the continuum are the limitless (and searchable) bounties of the free Shakespeare app on my smartphone. At the other end is... this.

Gimme, gimme, gimme. I borrowed a copy of The Tempest, there seeming a pleasing torque in seeing so substantial an edition of a play that deals in the insubstantial. When the courier arrived he was bearing a package roughly the size and weight of an occasional table. Thick layers of outer cardboard removed, I picked open an inner package wrapped tightly in brown paper. Inside was a solander box (like a big hinged slipcase) in dark green buckram a shade bigger in each direction, I'd say, than a volume of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.

Nesting inside that was the play itself: about fourteen inches by eleven, hand-marbled, half-bound in goatskin and titled in gold leaf. The pages inside -- just 80 of them, thick, deckle-edged, mould-made paper -- contain nothing but a clean text of the play, hand-printed in Baskerville the old-fashioned way. The glossaries, introduction, notes on the text, footnotes and so forth -- the edition is Stephen Orgel's 1987 Clarendon Press one -- are confined to a separate hardback volume hiding in the solander box under a false floor.

You need to sit in a chair to read this. But, ah, it's a pleasure to do so (once you've ensured the chair is clean, your hands are clean, your lap does not have any of your breakfast egg on it and your coffee is safely in the next room). The text doesn't half breathe -- especially if most of your Shakespeare-reading life has been confined to paperback Ardens or a scragged old copy of Collins's single-volume Alexander Text.

This is Shakespeare bling -- I think the word's appropriate, though it might not be the one the Folio Society would choose -- at a very high level. All that glisters, and so on, but still. If I had a spare twelve grand and -- frowns at calculator -- nine feet of shelf-space... y'know, I'd be seriously tempted.