Folger Collections

So, as those of you who have spent any time working with early modern printed books probably recognized, this month’s crocodile mystery focuses on signature marks. Below is the photo I posted last week, now with the signature mark circled…

Goran Proot On June 1st, Goran Proot became the new Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Rare Books at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Now that he’s had a chance to settle in a bit, it’s time for us to introduce him…

Going through a box of early 19th-century playbills recently, I was puzzled to see something paper-clipped to an area of loss on the right-hand edge of a bill, as if someone had attached a little note to it: Playbill for…

Sometimes the beauty of our blog is that we can share with you items in our collections: new acquisitions, recently restored works, or long-held pieces worth a closer look. Sometimes its beauty is that it makes it easy to share…

A cadel initial “L” with anthropomorphic features on leaf 2 of Augustine Vincent’s copy of Nomotechnia, by Henry Finch (1607) This letter L is an example of a cadel initial, or lettre cadeau, with anthropomorphic features; that is, it is…

Man in the moon stamp, STC 20938 Last month Folger Librarian Stephen Enniss announced our public launch of the Folger Bindings Image Collection. Today we introduce Collation readers to the database and describe in a bit more detail some of…

Have you ever wished there were a summer camp for bookish grown-ups? A retreat where we can spend a week amongst our own and not worry about being teased for loving libraries or getting hit in the glasses by a…

This post is a continuation of “John Bell, bibliographic nightmare.” I began to write these posts while entrenched in the difficult task of cataloging the library’s myriad copies of Bell’s 18th-century Shakespeare publications as a means of sharing a look into…

Manuscripts of unusual shapes and sizes are always fun to investigate, and we recently had the opportunity to reevaluate a particularly large and interesting one, a ca. 1600 “pew plan” written on a piece of parchment (Folger MS X.d.395), in…

Some close observation and deductive reasoning led commenters in the right direction in solving the June crocodile mystery. Here’s image that I posted last week, with a bit more context: With that bit of the surrounding context, it’s much clearer…

Some books are more challenging than others; some bibliographic questions are more complicated than others. This is the first of two posts that looks at a particularly challenging cataloging question. Today’s post will set up the challenge; the next one…

Commenters to last week’s post, Heirloom apples and pears, anyone?, correctly identified the shorthand text found in Henry Oxinden’s miscellany (Folger MS V.b.110) as the Lord’s Prayer written out according to Thomas Shelton’s method of shorthand, called tachygraphy. Below is…