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
How to plan a Shakespeare tercentenary
The Folger has a wide assortment of commemorative material relating to Shakespearean celebrations—from David Garrick’s 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee, to tercentaries and quatercentenaries of Shakespeare’s birth (although no materials from the quatercentenary of his death quite yet)—but we hold very few…
Letter Scraps
Yes, indeed. As several readers astutely figured out, this scrap of paper most likely bears the tail-end of the phrase “Sotheby sale.” As for why it’s in our collection? Well, part of that answer comes with one more piece of…
“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”: April 2016
Welcome to our April crocodile mystery! So tell us, dear readers, why this scrap of paper is in our collection, and what it might be?
Musae Faciles; or, an Oxford Study Guide
A guest post by Nicholas Tyacke Back in 2008, on the eve of directing a Faculty Weekend Seminar at the Folger, on “The University Cultures of Early-Modern Oxford and Cambridge,” I took the opportunity to consult the card catalog of…
New STC call numbers for old
The Great Reclassification has begun! As some of you may know, all newly-acquired vault material at the Folger is shelved in the order it was accessioned except for publications that fall within the scope of A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland,…
Where is that book? Tracing copies imaged for EEBO
How do you find a book? There are times when not just any copy will do, when you need to locate one exact copy of a book with a certain history. While gathering information for the Folger’s Digital Anthology of…
A monument more lasting than bronze
exegi monumentum aere perennius regalique situ pyramidum altius, quod non imber edax, non Aquilo inpotens possit diruere… (Odes III: XXX, lines 1-4, published 23BC) I have built a monument more lasting than bronze, higher than the Pyramids’ regal structures, that…
Fallen Type
Those of you who replied to the Crocodile post last week guessed right: what you see in this image is a piece of fallen type that was printed by accident over a page of text being printed. The height of…
“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”: March 2016
A new month and a new mystery. We’ll keep this short and sweet: What, exactly, are we seeing in this image? Leave your thoughts in the comments here, and we’ll be back on Tuesday with the answer.
Textual variants in Shakespeare's love letter to Anne Hathaway
When Shakespeare was young and in love, he wrote a gushing letter to his bride-to-be, enclosing with it a lock of his hair and five verses. Or that’s what an audacious teenager in the 1790s would have us all believe. The supposed love letter…
Documents, in microcosm
I have been part of the team that has been working to create Shakespeare Documented, which launched on January 20, 2016. In the last few weeks before launch, one of my main duties became the creation the thumbnail image for…
Formal designs
Did you solve last week’s crocodile mystery? It’s a sonnet! A visual representation of the phonetic structures of Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. XXIX, to be precise (rotated sideways to be extra-mysterious). The pattern was created by Marjory Bates Pratt in 1940,…