Stuart Kells has spent 20 years on the trail of the Bard’s books and manuscripts, which he believes have been scattered all over the world

In an autumn in which scholars have unearthed Milton’s copy of Shakespeare in Philadelphia and parchment fragments from the 13th-century epic Le Roman de la Rose in Worcester, Stuart Kells, author of the forthcoming Shakespeare’s Library, would like to be clear: he has not uncovered the Bard’s book collection, despite what the title might suggest.

“But I have confirmed its existence, clarified its scale and scope, and documented what happened to it,” says the author, who has spent 20 years on the trail of Shakespeare’s personal library, and lays out his search in his new book. “It would be a very different book if I had gone out and discovered his library. No one has done that. It isn’t in one spot. To the extent that it exists, it’s spread out. You need to approach Shakespeare in order to understand what it might have been like.”

Kells is by no means the first person to have embark on a quest to find Shakespeare’s library during the last 400 years. As he writes, “for every species of book person, the idea of Shakespeare’s library – his personal collection of manuscripts, books, letters and other papers – is enticing, totemic, a subject of wonder”. Because “Shakespeare certainly did have books, and he certainly read them. Why, then, have we found none of his manuscripts, and why are there no books with an authentic Shakespeare signature, bookplate, book label or inscription?”

Things are still being found and that’s part of the fun. The people who did the initial searching were not very thorough Stuart Kells

He believes that, when Shakespeare died in 1616, “some of the library was probably scattered”. The will of the Renaissance actor Nicholas Tooley asked his executor to “have a care to put off and sell my books to the most profit that he can”, and Kells suspects this is what happened to Shakespeare’s books. Those not sold on his death, or destroyed or lost, “are sitting quietly, in cabinets and on shelves, in public and private collections around the world”, he speculates.

“There are things out there still being found and that’s part of the fun. The people who did the initial searching were not very thorough, so there are wonderful things still to be found,” he says. “I think they are around the world. People are still finding chests of early letters, and there are volumes of multiple plays all bound together. Play scripts were thought of as low literature for some time – they were slightly disreputable and weren’t taken seriously. Some of 18th and 19th-century catalogues would only say, ‘here’s a bundle of play scripts.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Agostino Tornielli book, from 1615. Photograph: Folger Shakespeare Library

One of his tantalising findings is the potential former owner of a theologicial work by Agostino Tornielli. The book was published in Milan in 1610 and shipped to England, where it was bound in brown calfskin in 1615, the year before Shakespeare’s death. The cover panels on the book include an image of Pyramus and Thisbe, and the edges of the text block are decorated with elaborate patterning.

“The owner of the four bindings is not known, but there are a few hints. Do the fleurons signify a literary career? That would fit the depiction of Pyramus and Thisbe, which suggests a deep interest in literature (the owner chose a literary motif over a royal, ecclesiastical, political or military one) and possibly a deep interest in Shakespearean literature,” writes Kells. “In tiny letters, the cover image is signed ‘I. S.’ No one knows whether the initials are those of the block-maker, the bookbinder, the bookseller, the book’s owner, a patron or a dedicatee. No one has stepped forward to claim them.”

But the initials match those of Iohannes Shakespeare, William’s father, who dealt in leather hides – “no doubt some of them for bookbinding”, Kells writes.

Kells believes that one of the reasons for the disappearance of Shakespeare’s library is that the playwright was not an “avid inscriber of books”, or much of a letter writer. “Practically minded and commercial, he does not seem to have been driven by abstract ideas of fame and posterity,” Kells writes.

“In thinking about Shakespeare differently, as less of a literary person and more as a workaday person, it makes you think about the library in a different way. It doesn’t have lots of florid descriptions and ownership marks because he wasn’t that kind of a figure,” he says. “Not only was he on the fringes of what was respectable, he in some ways wasn’t taken seriously by literary people … To the extent he had a library, he wasn’t engaging with other people through inscriptions, and he didn’t take his fame very seriously. That’s one reason why potentially some of the key documents aren’t available.”

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As for Kells, he says: “I couldn’t stop looking for the library if I wanted to.”

“I’m quietly confident things are going to turn up,” he says. “We now see the quarto editions as some of the greatest literary treasures in the world but, up until the 19th century, they were thought of in a different way. They are slight documents, little pamphlets, so it’s very probable they’re out there. We now have clearer eyes to search for these things and different ways of analysing them and dating things. We’re in a golden era of discovery right now.”

• Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the Greatest Mystery in Literature by Stuart Kells is published by Text Publishing (£12.99)