Learning from readers
Sometimes the beauty of our blog is that we can share with you items in our collections: new acquisitions, recently restored works, or long-held pieces worth a closer look. Sometimes its beauty is that it makes it easy to share…
This post is brought to you by the letter L
A cadel initial “L” with anthropomorphic features on leaf 2 of Augustine Vincent’s copy of Nomotechnia, by Henry Finch (1607) This letter L is an example of a cadel initial, or lettre cadeau, with anthropomorphic features; that is, it is…
Folger Tooltips: Researching Bindings
Man in the moon stamp, STC 20938 Last month Folger Librarian Stephen Enniss announced our public launch of the Folger Bindings Image Collection. Today we introduce Collation readers to the database and describe in a bit more detail some of…
Learning to "read" old paper
Have you ever wished there were a summer camp for bookish grown-ups? A retreat where we can spend a week amongst our own and not worry about being teased for loving libraries or getting hit in the glasses by a…
Bell's nightmare continued
This post is a continuation of “John Bell, bibliographic nightmare.” I began to write these posts while entrenched in the difficult task of cataloging the library’s myriad copies of Bell’s 18th-century Shakespeare publications as a means of sharing a look into…
Pew-hopping in St. Margaret's Church
Manuscripts of unusual shapes and sizes are always fun to investigate, and we recently had the opportunity to reevaluate a particularly large and interesting one, a ca. 1600 “pew plan” written on a piece of parchment (Folger MS X.d.395), in…
Binding clasps
Some close observation and deductive reasoning led commenters in the right direction in solving the June crocodile mystery. Here’s image that I posted last week, with a bit more context: With that bit of the surrounding context, it’s much clearer…
John Bell, bibliographic nightmare
Some books are more challenging than others; some bibliographic questions are more complicated than others. This is the first of two posts that looks at a particularly challenging cataloging question. Today’s post will set up the challenge; the next one…
Thomas Shelton's shorthand version of the Lord's Prayer
Commenters to last week’s post, Heirloom apples and pears, anyone?, correctly identified the shorthand text found in Henry Oxinden’s miscellany (Folger MS V.b.110) as the Lord’s Prayer written out according to Thomas Shelton’s method of shorthand, called tachygraphy. Below is…
Colored print or color print?
Consider the following physical description in Hamnet, the Folger’s online catalog (it’s for an edition of Anna Jameson’s Characteristics of women, also published as Shakespeare’s heroines): xl, 340 p., leaves of plates : col. ill. ; 28 cm. The first…
Heirloom apples and pears, anyone?
We’ll begin with another crocodile-style challenge in this post, from a manuscript miscellany compiled by Henry Oxinden (or Oxenden) (1609-1670) of Barham, Kent, Folger MS V.b.110. Here’s a detail from p. of the miscellany: Can anyone identify what this text…
A book's fingerprints
Last week’s crocodile mystery may have been a bit too mysterious, but I hope that today’s post will inspire you to look for similar mysteries on your own. Here’s a close-up detail of what I was asking about: As with…