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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.
10mo!
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10mo!

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Sarah Werner

Sometimes books surprise us, and not always for the reasons we expect. Is there something unusual about the book below? Is is maybe a bit more narrowly oblong than usual? an oddly shaped book Two years ago, I took Rare…

So how do you find symbols in signature marks?
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So how do you find symbols in signature marks?

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Erin Blake Sarah Werner

Sarah: In my last post, I showed some examples of books that use symbols in signature marks. But how did I find these books and how might you find more examples? It’s one thing to search for books printed in…

The symbols of signature marks
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The symbols of signature marks

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Sarah Werner

I’ve written before about what sort of information we can learn from studying signature marks, and Goran wrote recently about the use of Latin abbreviations to indicate the gathering. So I thought the time has come to look at some of the…

Identifying a leather bookplate
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Identifying a leather bookplate

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Sarah Werner

As became clear in the robust conversation around this month’s crocodile mystery, what we’re looking at is a leather bookplate—a circular, good-tooled leather bookplate stamped with the initials “E. H.” and a rose. While the object itself might have been…

Four states of Shakespeare: the Droeshout portrait
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Four states of Shakespeare: the Droeshout portrait

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Sarah Werner

So the mysterious eye of this month’s crocodile belongs to no other than Shakespeare, as some readers immediately recognized: Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare on the title page of the First Folio More specifically, it is Shakespeare’s left right eye as depicted…

Waste not, want not
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Waste not, want not

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Sarah Werner

As all three commenters worked out, this month’s crocodile image is of printer’s waste used as endleaves. You can see the end of the book on the left side of the opening below (note the “finis” marking the end of…

From tweet to resource
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From tweet to resource

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Sarah Werner

This is the story of how a tweet can grow into an amazing scholarly resource. (And it ends with a plea for you to help!) Just over a year ago, in January 2013, I was looking through the Folger’s collection…

u/v, i/j, and transcribing other early modern textual oddities
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u/v, i/j, and transcribing other early modern textual oddities

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Sarah Werner

When you’re encountering early modern texts for the first time, you might be surprised not only that they use such variable spelling (heart? hart? harte?) but they seem to use the wrong letters in some places. And then there are…

Back-to-back reading
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Back-to-back reading

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Sarah Werner

As commenters bruxer and Lydia Fletcher worked out,  January’s crocodile mystery showed a detail of the head of a dos-à-dos binding, with a covered board running down the middle separating two gauffred text blocks. The full picture makes it a bit…

A look back at our 2013
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A look back at our 2013

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Sarah Werner

Here on The Collation, it’s been a busy 2013. Today’s post will be our 68th of the year, and as of December 15th, we’d racked up 46,012 visits from 33,411 unique visitors, producing 67,361 pageviews this year. *phew* It’s gratifying that we…

'Tis the season for almanacs
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'Tis the season for almanacs

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Sarah Werner

December crocodile As our two commenters on the last post sussed out, this month’s crocodile mystery is a detail from an almanac, the black “Swallow” overprinting the red “Dove” the names of authors of two different almanacs. Below is the full…

A practical look at the Practical Science of Printing
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A practical look at the Practical Science of Printing

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Sarah Werner

title page for Fertel, La science pratique de l’imprimerie In 1723, a Frenchman named Martin-Dominque Fertel published a book on printing, La science pratique de l’imprimerie. It’s good to look at early printing manuals, especially when one is trying to…

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