The Collation
Research and Exploration at the Folger
The Collation is a gathering of useful information and observations from Folger staff and researchers. Read more about this blog
“What manner o’thing is your crocodile?”: April 2021
Never smile at a crocodile…mystery, that is. Especially when Shakespeare looks this shocked. Which 20th century performer is holding Shakespeare’s terrified, Yorick-ified head? If you’re not too scared, leave your guesses in the comments below and come back next week…
Documenting mistakes in our documentation
If someone points out a typo in an online Finding Aid or a Hamnet catalog record, we gratefully say thank-you, fix it, and (usually) move on.For more on the differences between Finding aids and Hamnet records, see Manuscripts in libraries: catalog…
Pre-pandemic phone photo fails
As we hit the one year mark of special collections reading rooms closing around the world because of the pandemic, “primary source research” for many of us now consists of scrolling through our phones in search of photos of collection…
Making rum in unexpected places
Note from the editors: we are testing a new image viewer in this post, and there are some bugs still to work out. If any of the images aren’t loading for you and you see a blank box instead, try clearing…
Marks on Bindings
Thank you for your witty guesses to this month’s Crocodile, they are great! I also need to make a disclaimer: I am far from having collected enough evidence to answer this mystery, so like you, I only have guesses to…
“What manner o’thing is your crocodile?”: March 2021
We’ve come full circle—it’s (almost) March again. Or maybe it’s always been March? Instead of breaking your brain wondering how that can possibly be, here’s a new crocodile mystery to ponder: can you guess what happened to this binding and…
Postcards in the (home) archive: Meriden Gravure Co. postally unused postcards with messages
A guest post by Stephen Grant Gentle readers, we are now somewhat familiar with Meriden Gravure Co. postcards. Perhaps we had never paid attention to them before. In this post we will look at five Meriden postcards which contain interesting…
24,000 “preliminary” catalog records are better than nothing!
At least, we hope the approximately 24,000 “preliminary records” added to the Folger’s online catalog yesterday are better than nothing, which is what Hamnet had for most of these books since going live in 1997. Today’s Collation post explains where…
Balancing information and expertise: vernacular guidance on bloodletting in early modern calendars and almanacs
A guest post by Mary Yearl The first calendar printed as a book in Europe was also the first to contain a printed image of a bloodletting man.1 This point alone is indicative of the importance bloodletting played in medieval…
Fortune’s Fools: early tarot cards
As several of you guessed last week, this month’s crocodile mystery showed an early tarot card. When treating a copy of a 1673 edition of Vincent Reboul’s “Le Pelerinage de S. Maximin,” Folger conservators discovered two tarot cards used to…
“What manner o’thing is your crocodile?”: February 2021
Welcome back to another crocodile mystery. For February, please take a look at this image (strategically cropped for maximum mystery); tell us what you think it is, and/or what it represents. We’ll be back next week with the answer!
This Post Stinks, or, ‘I hope that the stuff will not smell too vilely’
John Masefield has a burning question he needs answered. Literally. Writing from his home Hill Crest in Boar’s Hill, Oxford, the Poet Laureate asks theater production veteran Allan Wade a crucial question about staging his home theatrical production of Macbeth.1…