Collection highlights

When Ptolemy’s Geography was translated into Latin, it had a powerful impact on Renaissance cartographers.

With this royal warrant, James I authorized his release from the Tower of London based upon the promise that Raleigh would voyage to the New World and return with gold.

The boy who would become King Henry VIII wrote “Thys boke is myne Prince Henry” in this copy of Cicero’s writings from 1502.

This Catholic Book of Hours contains a handwritten inscription by Elizabeth of York, whose marriage to Henry VII launched the Tudor dynasty and ended England’s Wars of the Roses.

This 1483 German Bible, often called the Korburger Bible, was among the early ones to be published in vernacular German.

This edition of Euclid’s Elements, printed in Venice in 1482, is considered the first full-length printed book with extensive mathematical illustrations.

This volume from the 1490s, with its hand-wrought chain to secure it to a shelf, is one of a few existing examples of a chain binding.

Among the earliest printed books in the Folger collection is this 1477 edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, one of only about a dozen relatively complete copies that have survived.

One of the Folger’s most prized bindings, decorated with seed pearls and raised silver thread, holds a 1608 manuscript in the hand of the calligrapher Esther Inglis.