Folger Collections

Recently, a handful of brave cast members, as well as the director, stage manager, and dialect coach of The Gaming Table all bellied up to that titular table to learn how to play Basset. Why Basset, you ask? And why did…

We are halfway through our first week of rehearsals for The Gaming Table, and it’s already too much fun not to share. So without further ado… Welcome to the Folger Theatre Production Diary for Susanna Centlivre’s The Gaming Table (originally titled The Basset Table), brought…

Did you think that “reduce, reuse, recycle” was just a modern slogan? Check out this early modern book: That’s an image of the front inside cover and front endleaf of a 1636 edition of Charles Fitz-Geffrey’s The blessed birth-day, which…

A guest post by Folger Institute participant and short-term fellow Lehua Yim Sixteenth-century England was particularly formative in the long history of what “Britain” means for the peoples of that archipelago, as reformulations of political, legal, economic, and religious institutions…

Sometimes we come across a manuscript on the market that looks vaguely familiar, and sends us scrambling to Hamnet to figure out why. I was reminded of this last week when a bookseller offered us a “naval return for Queen…

For teachers, this is the season of grading; for students, this is the season of exam-taking and paper-writing. For some of you, both students and teachers, you get slammed on both sides (no matter how much you enjoy writing or…

Hello again from your blogfriend Louis Butelli, lately of Folger Theatre’s Othello. I am very, very pleased to report the following couple of things! 1. We had an incredible closing night this past Sunday. We were sold to the rafters…

Every November, the International Fine Print Dealers’ Association (IFPDA) holds a fair at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. Colloquially known as the New York Print Fair, almost 100 dealers from the US, Canada, and Europe bring a selection from…

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of major transition for English heralds, as the number of arms being granted increased exponentially, requiring improved methods of record-keeping. Their job was both ceremonial (ordering and keeping score at tournaments, ordering…

Headers on blogs are sometimes just pretty pictures, just as sometimes books sitting on a shelf are just books sitting there. In this case, however, the books sitting on the shelf in our header image are not only pretty, but…

Hidden collections—that is, collections that are undescribed or underdescribed—are exceedingly common in libraries and archives. Until recently, the manuscript and printed paper that make up the E. Williams watermark collection, including papers of the Hale family of King’s Walden and…

“When I was young and first read ‘OTHELLO,’ I thought the character of RODERIGO of little importance; it seemed introduced merely to fill up those vacancies of action which might otherwise have remained unemployed.” Hey, blogfriends! It’s your pal Louis,…