Folger Collections

A guest post by Katherine Walker The Folger houses many impressive texts and manuscripts. So much so, in fact, that it is easy to overlook the library’s equally vast and provocative collection of less illustrious genres. These texts will not…

A guest post by Chelsea Phillips With the cherry trees blooming (almost), the sun shining (sometimes), and tax season looming, there is no more delightful time to consider the vagaries of 18th-century theatrical accounting practice. The Folger Shakespeare Library holds…

John Lancaster’s guess for March’s crocodile post is correct: This catechism, printed in Basel by Andreas Gesner, has an STC number because it follows the use of Salisbury; it therefore belongs to the group of books not in English printed…

Milliner Adelle Gresock describes below how she created the fabulous chapeaux seen in ‘Nell Gwynn.’

Folger X.c.92 (3) is my new favorite manuscript: it’s a letter written in Paris that single-handedly demonstrates the fact that “new style” dates refer to two different calendar modernizations. One modernization has to do with the Christian calendar’s reckoning of…

Nell Gwynn offers a glimpse into the boisterous world of Restoration theater and the true story of one of its most famous heroines—but another compelling tale is that of ‘The Country Gentleman’ and its scandal.

Folger manuscripts W.b.110 and W.b.111 are an oddly mis-matched pair. W.b.110 is nearly 46cm tall (almost 18 inches, for those playing along at home) and nearly 160 leaves, while W.b.111 is a good 10cm shorter and about a third the…

As you guessed, the image from last week’s Crocodile Post is a hand-drawn plan for a vault. This particular one was intended to store the Folger’s rare books during World War II. The hand-drawn plan is the work of Stanley…

Among the many treasures of the Folger is a lavish “Cosway binding” that includes five unique miniatures by a 20th-century British artist, “Miss C. B. Currie,” based on the images from the book itself. One of the oddest to modern…

A guest post by Jason McElligott Let me begin with a confession that may not endear me to many friends of the Folger: I don’t enjoy Shakespeare. To be completely honest, I find him hard work. Now, I am not…

Andres Alvarez-Davila was a Dumbarton-Oaks intern at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2017-2018. One of Andres’ projects was to determine the scope of the Spanish book collection at Folger, which is, for the most part, only searchable in the card…

A guest post by Liza Blake What is an Aesopian fable in the Renaissance? This post is about where our modern Aesopian fables come from, drawing on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s incredibly rich collections of animal fables. For more detail…