The Collation

The Folger owns a variety of printed items related to the cinematic history of Shakespeare—screenplays and manuscript drafts, pressbooks and souvenir programs, and still photographs. Generally, there’s a good chance that we also have the related film recording in some…

While working on the exhibition “Age of Lawyers” (currently on view at the Folger Shakespeare Library), I came upon several interesting copies of Thomas Littleton’s Tenures, the first textbook written on English land law. There are five different copies of…

A guest post by Gail McMurray Gibson, William R. Kenan Professor Emerita of English and Humanities, Davidson College. When the Macro Plays manuscript pages recently came out of the Folger vault for a day of conversation with scholars, curators, and…

The Folger’s blog renovations are done! The Collation now has a new look and a new tag line, but the same enthusiastic commitment to research and exploration at the Folger (which is now spelled out as such in the tag line). New look home page It’s not hugely…

It is nearly the end of another month, so we’re sure most of you are expecting another intriguing Crocodile Mystery. However, this month we are going to be taking a very brief hiatus while we do some fall cleaning, and…

We thought we had the right question. Renate Mesmer (Head of Conservation), Heather Wolfe (Curator of Manuscripts), and I invited several scholars to the Folger for a lab-based discussion on “V.a.354: What to do about the Macro Manuscripts?” Specifically, the…

Over the past few months, EMMO has been busy with several first-ever activities connected to transcribing manuscripts at the Folger. In August, we transcribed excerpts from over twenty four manuscripts currently exhibited in the Age of Lawyers Exhibition (running until…

As one reader quickly guessed, the photograph featured in last week’s crocodile post is part of an admission ticket to the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s burial place. This ticket is one window onto the growth of tourism in…

Here’s your crocodile mystery for October! As you can probably guess, the text below is only one line of a larger collection item. What kind of thing is the whole item an example of, and why is it in our…

A Guest Post by Claire M. L. Bourne A major fringe benefit of systematically going through so many books (1,300+) at the Folger last year, looking for typographic conventions and experiments, was encountering traces of use and reading that have…

The Folger Shakespeare has recently acquired a copy of the 1706 English edition of the travel narrative A New Voyage to the North… (Folger 269- 090q), written by the French physician Pierre Martin de la Martinière (1637-1676?) and published posthumously…

John Ward’s sixteen notebooks, once they are fully transcribed for EMMO, are going to be an incredibly rich source for nearly everyone who thinks about or studies early modern England. Most people have heard about them because of John Ward’s…