Caroline Duroselle-Melish
Cracks in Etched Plates
Originally, I was going to do a crocodile post about the binding of this architecture book by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau: Title page of Folger NA2625 .A63 1615 Cage Photo by Caroline Duroselle-Melish But after I thought about it, it…
The Reformation at Folger
As this year marks the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 theses and along with it, the beginning of the Reformation, a blog post on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Reformation collection is in order.See also the blog post “Folger as a…
A Yellow Book
Thank you to those who have tried to solve this month’s Crocodile mystery regarding the yellow color of a book, which can be found in the Stickelberger collection of Reformation at the Folger Shakespeare Library (more on this collection in…
Sophisticating the First Folio
This week we will continue our discussion of the First Folios currently on display in the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition, First Folio! Shakespeare’s American Tour. This post will look at their “sophistication.” A “sophisticated” or made-up book is a defective…
Ben Jonson's Library
While last week we brought up the anniversary of Ben Jonson’s first folio and discussed copies of this book that are held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, this week we’ll discuss Jonson’s library and his books at Folger. Jonson is…
Don Quixote on an Early Paper Cover
The Folger Shakespeare Library recently acquired a copybook with an intriguing pictorial paper cover, and it is, of course, the subject of the crocodile mystery we posted last week. This cover is made of thick paper (thicker than regular paper…
Investigating a Bull's Head Watermark
What would draw an eighteenth-century reader to an early sixteenth-century book, written in Latin, on venereal disease? The Folger Shakespeare Library’s copy of Ulrich von Hutten’s book De Guaici medicina et morbo gallico liber unus printed in 1531 by Johann…
Fallen Type
Those of you who replied to the Crocodile post last week guessed right: what you see in this image is a piece of fallen type that was printed by accident over a page of text being printed. The height of…
Purchases from the Robert S. Pirie Collection, Part 2: the printed material
The Folger Shakespeare Library acquired 45 lots, 19 of them printed books, at the auction sale of the Pirie collection that took place on December 2–4, 2015, at Sotheby’s, New York (we’ve also put up the complete list of our…
“Extravagantly Large Paper”
While working on the exhibition “Age of Lawyers” (currently on view at the Folger Shakespeare Library), I came upon several interesting copies of Thomas Littleton’s Tenures, the first textbook written on English land law. There are five different copies of…
The first new Folger Folio (Fourth Folio, that is) in over 80 years
This copy of the Fourth Folio, published in 1685, is the first Shakespeare Folio to be added to the Folger Shakespeare Library collection since the days of our founders, Henry Folger (1857-1930) and Emily Folger (1858-1936). The collection now holds…
An Example of Printed Visual Marginalia
The Folger Shakespeare has recently acquired a copy of the 1706 English edition of the travel narrative A New Voyage to the North… (Folger 269- 090q), written by the French physician Pierre Martin de la Martinière (1637-1676?) and published posthumously…