Folger Collections

A guest post by Alicia Petersen What comes to mind when you think of a coded letter? Political intrigue? Espionage? As the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2014-5 exhibition Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers highlighted, these guesses are…

Thanks for the great comments on last week’s Crocodile Mystery. Everyone scores ten points, with full marks going to the two commenters who correctly identified the publication.Plus a happy-face sticker on Philip’s comment for the tongue-in-cheek description of the apparent…

Welcome to a new regular series here on The Collation! Curatorial staff will be writing short pieces focusing on new acquisitions, hopefully giving our readers a glimpse into how we’re building our collections. Today, I’m excited to share a small…

Dr. Emma Poltrack shares items she presented on June 3, 2021 as an introduction to Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls.

We had seven excellent answers to the Crocodile, which included an image titled “Malice,” but not the text below it. The general consensus was that the cowering man was winding thread or wool off of a drop spindle. One of…

…a Collation KAL (knit-along). Cast on We built our friendship with knits and purls over coffee in the Folger Tea Room. Sharing patterns, exchanging techniques, and giving fiber recommendations are still staple conversation topics for us seven years after we…

Rachel B. Dankert, Learning and Engagement Librarian, shares items she presented on May 6, 2021 as an introduction to Circe by Madeline Miller.

Dr. Emma Poltrack shares the items she presented on April 1, 2021 as an introduction to ‘A Bright Ray of Darkness’ by Ethan Hawke.

If someone points out a typo in an online Finding Aid or a Hamnet catalog record, we gratefully say thank-you, fix it, and (usually) move on.For more on the differences between Finding aids and Hamnet records, see Manuscripts in libraries: catalog…

As we hit the one year mark of special collections reading rooms closing around the world because of the pandemic, “primary source research” for many of us now consists of scrolling through our phones in search of photos of collection…

Dr. Emma Poltrack shares the Folger collection items she presented on March 4, 2021 as an introduction to ‘Hag-Seed’ by Margaret Atwood.

Thank you for your witty guesses to this month’s Crocodile, they are great! I also need to make a disclaimer: I am far from having collected enough evidence to answer this mystery, so like you, I only have guesses to…