Folger Collections

Here’s a little transcription exercise for our Crocodile readers: Folger MS V.a.429, fol. 29r. This is the title of a recipe in a book of culinary and medical receipts compiled between approximately 1675 and 1750 by a few generations of…

As I hope Collation readers know by now, the Folger is committed to openly accessible resources. Last week provided one example of the exciting results from such a scholarly pooling of knowledge. The story begins with a conference held at the…

In the fall of 1960 an auction catalog was delivered to the Acquisitions Department of the Folger Shakespeare Library in which the following small typewritten notice was enclosed: The typewritten note from Sotheby’s The auction catalog was from Sotheby’s and…

With the Exhibition Hall closed for needed repairs this summer, I got to thinking about the various displays it has held over the years. Folger Shakespeare Library Exhibition Hall, circa 1935 in 1931, before the library opened (click to enlarge…

In some ways, this image is a perfectly ordinary one (well, ordinary if it’s possible to think of an autograph manuscript of Mary Wroth’s important sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus  as ordinary): Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (fol. 65r) Heather Wolfe…

Co-written by Heather Wolfe and Bill Sherman Thomas Milles’s motto, inscribed at the bottom of the title page in Columbia University’s copy of An Out-Port-Customers Accompt (STC 17935), as reproduced on EEBO. It appears in print on many of his…

It is an understatement to say that the layout of most books doesn’t show much daring, and that academic publications are among the most dull in this respect. But solid content and tasteful form do not necessarily exclude each other,…

A couple of weeks back I posted some images with the aim of destabilizing some of our assumptions about what early modern texts look like. In the mix was an image of a “big” book followed by a “tiny” one.…

There were two odd things happening in last week’s crocodile mystery, which featured an opening from the first English edition of Nicolàs Monardes’s Joyfull newes out of the newe founde worlde (STC 18005). The first was the easier to spot, assuming you…

Sometimes it’s fun just to look at books without worrying what they are and who printed them and what the text says. And sometimes, when you do that, you notice all sorts of ways in which they’re weird—they mix manuscript…

Last month’s post from me (your friendly neighborhood art historian) looked at trial proofs and progressive proofs (see Proof prints, part one). As promised, here’s a look at a third kind of proof in printmaking: proofs that aren’t really “proofs” as…

I have always been a devotee of the “Aldine leaf”, even long before I knew its exact name or where it actually came from, and I am still delighted spotting it in early modern typography or when it is expertly…