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Sarah Werner

held a number of roles during her time at the Folger, including Editor of The Collation (2011–2015). She is the author of Studying Early Printed Books 1450-1800: A Practical Guide, co-editor of PBSA (The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America) and occasionally still writes a blog and newsletter, which can be found from her website.
When Blog History Meets Book History
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When Blog History Meets Book History

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Sarah Werner

When I was starting my transformation from a theater scholar to a book historian around 2006, the world of social media, as we now call it, was not only a source of community and information about the field, but a…

Correcting with cancel slips
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Correcting with cancel slips

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Sarah Werner

correcting 4 lines (STC 25286; sig. 1r)Thanks to my last post, when Mitch Fraas and I were looking at how different copies of the same book handled having a printer error (Judas instead of Jesus, in that case), I’ve spent the…

Keeping your Jesus and Judas straight
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Keeping your Jesus and Judas straight

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Mitch Fraas Sarah Werner

Co-written by Sarah Werner and Mitch Fraas One might think that when printing the New Testament, one would want to avoid at all costs mixing up Jesus and Judas. However, this month’s crocodile shows that such mistakes did happen: the typo…

Twelfth Night
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Twelfth Night

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Sarah Werner

What better play to consider on the twelfth night of Christmas than Twelfth Night? Viola Allen and James Young as Viola and Sebastian (1904) Although there are discrepant practices today whether the Feast of the Epiphany—marking the visit of the…

Farewell to 2014
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Farewell to 2014

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Sarah Werner

The end of the year is a time that invites self-reflection and speculation for the future. As the editor of The Collation, late December makes me want to assess how our year here went—how many readers did we reach, how…

Dalí as you like him
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Dalí as you like him

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Sarah Werner

The change of pace in this month’s crocodile mystery is thanks to Salvador Dalí. Surely you, like our commenters, recognized those elongated legs. And if I’d shared the companion image, you’d have guessed that immediately as well. Dalí’s backdrop for…

A carousel of tragedy
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A carousel of tragedy

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Sarah Werner

We are used to thinking of productions of Shakespeare’s plays as creating new works of art that demonstrate the vitality of the centuries-old drama. But in the right hands, books can achieve the same effect. Emily Martin’s The Tragedy of…

Finding women in the printing shop
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Finding women in the printing shop

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Sarah Werner

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day that celebrates not only the achievements of Ada Lovelace—the 19th-century mathematician and computing pioneer—but the achievements of all women in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and maths. It’s a chance not only…

When is an inscription not an inscription?
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When is an inscription not an inscription?

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Sarah Werner

Two folks identified the key elements of this month’s crocodile mystery in their comments: Misha Teramura correctly noted that the inscription in the middle of the page—“pp. 184-190 refer to the progress of religion westward toward America”—refers to George Herbert’s…

Surprised by Stanhope
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Surprised by Stanhope

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Sarah Werner

My favorite encounter with a book is one where I think I know what I’m going to find, but then something else entirely happens. My most recent serendipitous encounter came thanks to a tweet: Sjoerd Levelt was tweeting some images…

Constructing volvelles
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Constructing volvelles

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Sarah Werner

As Elizabeth Bruxer correctly identified within a few short hours of its posting, this month’s crocodile mystery showed the inner disc of an unconstructed volvelle from a copy of the 1591 edition of Giambattista della Porta’s De furtivis literarum  notis (STC…

Pop Shakespeare's typography
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Pop Shakespeare's typography

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Sarah Werner

If you’ve been spending any time on social media recently, you’re likely to have come across Pop Sonnets, a new Tumblr that provides, in their words, “Old twists on new tunes, every Thursday.” Here, for instance, is their deft rewriting…

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