The Collation

A guest post by Ruma Chopra It took the English doctor Thomas Short eighteen years to publish his nearly 1000-page assessment of the relationship between climates and diseases. Published in 1749, his two-volume history, A general chronological history of the…

One of the most important physical aspects of our collection is the very paper on which the books, manuscripts, and drawings were created. Unsurprisingly, we’ve had quite a few posts on this topic! This week, we invite you to take…

A guest post by Stephen Grant My first descent into the underground vault took place in 2007 during a short-term Folger fellowship. Since a Summer Retrospective is the order of the day with The Collation, I should like to acknowledge…

Eyebrow shaping has been a thing for a long time. Including in the early modern period. Another one of our favorite posts from the past comes from the time when Heather Wolfe found a whole section on eyebrows in one…

If you’ve ever been confused by the differences between woodcuts, engravings, and etchings, clearly you’re not alone! This post by Erin Blake, from 2012, is perennially one of our most popular. So in case you missed it the first time…

Happy summer, everyone! (Or happy winter, if you’re in the southern hemisphere!) From now until the end of August, we’re going to be doing a summer retrospective here on The Collation, highlighting some of our past posts. This blog has…

When, in Act 2 of William Shakespeare’s famous teen suicide play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet muses “hat’s in a name? That which we call a rose / y any other word would smell as sweet,”Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston,…

Tell us what you think is going on here! If you have correctly answered a crocodile post in the last 6 months, please consider giving it a couple days for others to have a guess, and no checking Hamnet, either…

A guest post by Lauren Working Letter from Thomas Wood to Richard Bagot, 10 October 1576, Folger MS L.a.987 (click for zoomable version) Thomas Wood’s 1576 letter to Richard Bagot begins conventionally enough. Wood was sending some artichoke “slips” with…

A guest post by Alicia Meyer The Folger Shakespeare Library houses three etchings of African diasporic people by Wenceslaus Hollar. While we may never know the identities of the figures in these images, Hollar’s artistic choices direct how we see…

For the June 2019 “Crocodile Mystery” we asked you to spot the differences between these two pictures: Frontispiece illustration for Two Gentlemen of Verona from Thomas Hanmer’s 6-volume edition of Shakespeare’s plays, published 1743-44: original drawing (A) and published print…

Last month’s Crocodile Mystery asked you to name what the images had in common. This month we ask the opposite: what’s different? How many differences can you spot? Click the image for a larger view. Much MUCH larger versions of…