Shakespeare's works—both poetic and dramatic—had a rich history in print before the publication of the First Folio: from the first publications of "Venus and Adonis" (1593) and "The Rape of Lucrece" (1594), 78 individual printed editions of his works are known. (23) of these editions are his poetry, and the remaining (55) his plays. Counting by number of editions published before 1623, the best-selling works were "Venus and Adonis" (12 editions), "The Rape of Lucrece" (6 editions), and "Henry IV, Part 1" (6 editions). Of the 23 editions of the poems, 16 were published in octavo; the rest, and almost all of the editions of the plays, were printed in quarto. The quarto format was made by folding a large sheet of printing paper twice, forming 4 leaves with 8 pages. The average quarto measured and was made up of sheets, giving 72 total pages. Octavos—made by folding a sheet of the same size three times, forming 8 leaves with 16 pages—were about half as large as a quarto. Since the cost of paper represented of a book's total production costs, octavos were generally cheaper to manufacture than quartos, and a common way to reduce publishing costs was to reduce the number of pages needed by compressing (using two columns or a smaller typeface) or abbreviating the text.