AS scholars have come to attend more and more to readers' annota~tions as indicators of habits of reading, marked copies of books LI. owned by English writers have come under increasing scrutiny. But the extent to which these copies survive varies widely, from Robert Burton's vast library to what may be the single surviving volume owned by William Shakespeare.' In this respect Edmund Spenser is an especially unfortunate case. One of the most learned poets of his age, he seems to have left behind very few of his books. His copy of the 1590 Faerie Queene survives, as do copies of two books that he sent to Gabriel Harvey.2 The Folger Shakespeare Library has in its collections, however, two of what may prove to be the most interesting of his few extant books. The last leaf of one of them contains what Peter Beal describes as