The Collation

Although the Folger Shakespeare Library officially opened on Shakespeare’s birthday in 1932 and readers began arriving at the Library in early 1933, it wasn’t until later that the idea of a proper card catalog for readers’ use was introduced. For…

(UPDATE January 23: In editing this post, I inadvertently inserted an inaccurate use of “Dutch” as a modifier in the post title; I’ve now updated it to the correct “Flemish”. SW.) The Folger Shakespeare Library has very strong Continental holdings.…

As commenters bruxer and Lydia Fletcher worked out,  January’s crocodile mystery showed a detail of the head of a dos-à-dos binding, with a covered board running down the middle separating two gauffred text blocks. The full picture makes it a bit…

A new month, a new year, a new mystery for you to enjoy! This month’s crocodile might be immediately recognizable to some of you, but perhaps not to others, and sometimes it’s fun to take a fresh look even at…

Perpetual calendars in the early modern period relied on knowing a given year’s “dominical letter” or  “Sunday letter”—the letter corresponding to the date of the first Sunday in January where A=1, B=2, C=3, and so on. This New Year’s Eve, we’re…

As we enter the holiday season and look forward to spending time with our families and friends, it is of course always useful to take a moment to reflect upon the antics of other people’s families. Even better if those…

Here on The Collation, it’s been a busy 2013. Today’s post will be our 68th of the year, and as of December 15th, we’d racked up 46,012 visits from 33,411 unique visitors, producing 67,361 pageviews this year. *phew* It’s gratifying that we…

This year, the Folger is one of ten host institutions for the National Digital Stewardship Residencies, a nine-month grant-funded program created by the Library of Congress and the Institute of Museum and Library Studies. The NDSR program, in their own…

For more than a year now I have been working with volunteers on the Flemish holdings in the Folger. I reported on this project at the annual international conference of Sixteenth Century Society and Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico,…

December crocodile As our two commenters on the last post sussed out, this month’s crocodile mystery is a detail from an almanac, the black “Swallow” overprinting the red “Dove” the names of authors of two different almanacs. Below is the full…

Now that we’re back to our regular twice-weekly schedule of posts, it’s time to bring back our crocodile mystery series! Can’t remember why we refer to these things as crocodiles? It’s a reference to a line from Antony and Cleopatra—check…

There’s a persistent rumor that “Mr. Folger never paid more than x for a painting.” The value of x depends on who’s telling the story, but it’s generally around $2,000 and is used as evidence that he wasn’t interested in paintings.…