Folger Collections

World, meet Sem. Sem, meet the World. Looks thrilled, doesn’t he? Well, you’d be a bit jaded, too, if you’d been hanging around the Folger for over 80 years, waiting for someone to finally notice you. Self portrait of the…

Hello once again from your pal Louis Butelli. This Tuesday, April 2nd, we will commence rehearsals for Robert Richmond’s production of Twelfth Night, beginning April 30th at the Folger Theatre – get your tickets here!! I’m going to be playing…

When we think of filing today, we think of digital files and folders, and manilla folders, hanging files, and filing cabinets. But what did filing look like in early modern England? How did people deal with all their receipts and…

During the last couple of months at the Folger, we have come across a number of exceptional ornamental initials in Flemish imprints, as we are processing these systematically together with two interns. Bettie Payne and Amanda Daxon were trained to make…

Another sede vacante has come and gone. With the wall-to-wall coverage of contemporary media, this one made witnesses of us all. Or at least, the coverage let us witness the events outside the conclave and to share our speculation about…

American theater manager and playwright Augustin Daly (1838–1899) had a unique way of commemorating his productions. He collected illustrations, letters, and ephemera connected with the his staging, connected with historic productions of the play, and connected with the story of…

In my last post, I described this month’s crocodile mystery as more of a rhetorical device than a question to be answered: what does this box prompt us to imagine what might be? All images in this post can be…

This post was originally going to be titled “Murder in the Archives” and was going to be about an account in William Westby’s 1688 diary (Folger MS V.a.469) of the discovery of a dismembered body found scattered on a dung…

Katie deBuys as Princess Katherine in Henry V. Photo by Scott Suchman. Earlier this week, actor Katie deBuys (currently playing Princess Katherine in Henry V at the Folger) took us behind the scenes of a Sunday evening performance. The Sunday…

broadside advertising a 1617 auction (click to enlarge in a new window/tab) Let it be known that amongst the furniture of the late Duke of Aerschot, there are about 2000 paintings in all kinds of colors by a variety of excellent…

So the short answer to last week’s crocodile mystery is that this is a picture of Gwen Lally in the role of Henry V: Gwen Lally as Henry V How did I know that’s who this was? Well, click on…

The last round of book illustration myth-busting looked at how copper plates wear out (and how they don’t wear out). This time, I’d like to take a bucket of archival research and dump it on a related myth. How many…