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
One way of looking at many books
Last week I wrote about two students who worked on (two different copies of) the same book. But looking over the 64 texts that the 66 students I’ve taught over the last five years (in eight different seminars), I’m struck…
A newly uncovered presentation copy by Margaret Cavendish
Heather: The other day I received an email from the Conservation Lab with the subject line: “Annotation found on the verso of a lined frontispiece,” and a link to a couple of images, one taken under ultraviolet light. The conservators…
Two ways of looking at the same book
As I’ve written about before, in my Undergraduate Seminars students devote the bulk of their research time to crafting a biography of the book they’ve chosen as their primary focus. They find out who wrote the book and who printed…
Investigating the origins of a Folger manuscript
With this post we inaugurate a series by people working at the Folger as Interns. Classroom work and professional training never quite capture the true nature of the j – o – b. Therefore, for those pursuing advanced degrees in…
Folger Tooltips: Introducing "Folger Collection, by Folger Readers"
The purpose of this post is to introduce a new venue for you, Dear Readers, to post, share, and comment on photos taken by in the course of your research here: a new Flickr group, “Folger Collection, by Folger Readers”.…
Wagner and Shakespeare meet in Bayreuth
Back in August, I posted about a unique artists’ book from 1995. Today, I’d like to showcase an example from the other end of the twentieth century, an artists’ book created in 1908 by American painter Pinckney Marcius-Simons (1867–1909). In…
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Did you think that “reduce, reuse, recycle” was just a modern slogan? Check out this early modern book: That’s an image of the front inside cover and front endleaf of a 1636 edition of Charles Fitz-Geffrey’s The blessed birth-day, which…
“What’s that letter?”: Searching for water amongst the leaves
A guest post by Folger Institute participant and short-term fellow Lehua Yim Sixteenth-century England was particularly formative in the long history of what “Britain” means for the peoples of that archipelago, as reformulations of political, legal, economic, and religious institutions…
Manuscript reunions
Sometimes we come across a manuscript on the market that looks vaguely familiar, and sends us scrambling to Hamnet to figure out why. I was reminded of this last week when a bookseller offered us a “naval return for Queen…
'Tis the season
For teachers, this is the season of grading; for students, this is the season of exam-taking and paper-writing. For some of you, both students and teachers, you get slammed on both sides (no matter how much you enjoy writing or…
Something borrowed . . .
Georgianna: Did you ever wonder why or how we borrow items to show in our exhibitions at the Folger? Let’s use the upcoming “Shakespeare’s Sisters: Women Writers, 1500-1700,” opening on February 2, 2012, as an example. My colleague Caryn Lazzuri…
The most interesting use of our data will not be what we think it is
In Bloom It’s safe to say, the bloom is off the rose. Online collections just aren’t as sexy as they once were. Increasingly ubiquitious plans to put digital images online excite an increasingly smaller crowd. And projects that rely on…