The Collation

The rusty outline we showed in last week’s Crocodile post is, as one of our responders, Giles Bergel, correctly guessed, from a pair of scissors. It appears in Folger First Folio number 58, in Henry IV, part 1 (pp. 50-51). This First Folio…

Here is another ghostly residue for you to identify, for this month’s Crocodile Mystery: As always, leave your thoughts and guesses in the comments, and come back next week to find out the answer.

Manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are going digital with added features for users! The launch of a beta website for Early Modern Manuscripts Online next month will provide encoded transcriptions to accompany manuscript images and metadata. The number of transcriptions…

When I retrieved Sh.Misc. 1639 from the shelf, I wasn’t sure what to expect from an item described on the catalog card as “Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration. Mementoes, tickets, programs…” Many of the components turned out to be fairly common–though no…

I used to hate Hamnet’s one-box “Basic Search”—the landing page you get when you click the “Search” tab at http://hamnet.folger.edu—but two things happened last Thursday to change this. What caused the change of heart? Read on. First, the Basic Search now defaults to “Keyword…

This month’s Crocodile Mystery was a bit of a trick, rather than a treat (although hopefully this post will fulfill the treat aspect)—as far as I know, it really is just a fancy, decorated letter A. This is one of…

Welcome to the November Crocodile Mystery! Take a look at the image below and tell us, if you can, what it is and where it appears in our collection? As always, leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments below,…

While last week we brought up the anniversary of Ben Jonson’s first folio and discussed copies of this book that are held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, this week we’ll discuss Jonson’s library and his books at Folger. Jonson is…

Although many people talk about Shakespeare’s First Folio, we often forget another, perhaps equally important, First Folio that arrived slightly earlier, in 1616. While most of the attention this year has been on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, this other…

The answer to last week’s crocodile mystery? As Jan Kellett correctly pointed out in her comment to the October Crocodile Mystery, the red-orange concentric circles in this image are an “offset mark made by a seal.” The mark was made…

A new crocodile mystery for a new month! Can you tell us what this is? As always, please comment with your thoughts and guesses about our mystery image, and we’ll be back next week with the answer!

Maps, today, are ubiquitous. We have them in our phones, on our public transit, on walls and signs everywhere you turn. Many people learn to read and interpret them from an early age. Conventions that we don’t even know are…