The Collation

Welcome to the end of another month and another Crocodile Mystery. This month’s Crocodile is brought to you by Folger manuscripts! Here’s a detail from a bifolium that is part of a collection of papers described at the item-level in…

Today is the 400th anniversary of the birth of Elias Ashmole. Perhaps best known today for giving his name (and the founding collection of antiquities and “curiosities”) to the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, this 17th-century antiquarian had…

You’re probably aware that a significant amount of the Folger’s collection remains uncataloged; the majority of items have at least brief records in our online catalog Hamnet, but even today some collections are accessible only through the card catalog. We don’t…

As this year marks the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 theses and along with it, the beginning of the Reformation, a blog post on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Reformation collection is in order.See also the blog post “Folger as a…

The Folger’s Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama (EMED) is delighted to announce the release of twenty early modern plays, freely available to read and download. EMED offers you the chance to explore the vibrant scene of professional theater…

As one reader guessed, the phrase shown in last week’s Crocodile mystery image is in secretary hand, i.e., a type of handwritten script widely used in the British Isles (and elsewhere in Europe) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As transcribed…

For the Crocodile Mystery this month, peer into the handwriting of this manuscript and let us know what word or words you see and/or what they mean. Leave your thoughts and guesses as a reply in the Comments section. Check…

The Folger Institute is pleased to announce our 2017-18 cohort of Long-Term Fellows. This year we will welcome seven long-term scholars to the Folger: James Bromley, Urvashi Chakravarty, Surekha Davies, Nicholas Popper, Nigel Smith, Julianne Werlin, and Jessica Wolfe. The…

New staff members (and researchers!) are sometimes surprised to find that on-order and newly received collection materials show up in Hamnet searches. Many special collections libraries keep that information staff-only until the material has arrived, been processed, and sent to the…

Yes, last week’s Crocodile Mystery was a close-up image of a woodblock. This woodblock, in particular: Folger 245- 324f woodblock 1 And in fact, it is the woodblock that was used to print this image: “Lactuca florescens,” a variety of…

A guest post by Derek Dunne For anyone who has worked in the Reading Room of the Folger Shakespeare Library, you’ll know that a certain amount of paperwork is part of the daily routine: sign-in sheets, call slips, and of…

As March draws to a close, spring has finally (mostly) sprung in Washington DC (we’ll not talk about our poor cherry blossoms). If the days are warming up where you are as well, contemplate this Crocodile Mystery while you enjoy…