The Collation

We’re back! For this month’s Crocodile Mystery, we ask a classic question: what’s going on with this image? What is the purpose or function of the image shown? As always, leave your thoughts in the comments below, and we’ll be…

It seems appropriate to finish up our summer retrospective series with one of the earliest (and perennially most popular) posts. Whether it’s a back-to-basics refresher for you or an answer to the question you’ve been asking yourself, Deciphering Signature Marks…

It seems fitting that with last week’s retrospective post being all about paper, this week we should turn to the age-old question: just what do you call it when a book still has pages joined together (aside from “difficult to…

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…