Skip to main content
The Collation

"What manner o’thing is your crocodile?": January 2017

For this month’s Crocodile Mystery, have a look at the handwriting and discoloration in this detail. What’s going on? Leave a reply in the Comments section to share your thoughts.

crocodile-jan2017

Comments

This seems to be a fragment of an endorsement on a letter from Edward Stafford to Walter Bagot (L.a.874). It looks like the wax of the seal had seeped through the folded paper, causing two points of the same page to stick together (pp. 29-30), which then tore off a chunk of the paper when the letter was opened. This meant the annotator had to write the endorsement across two surfaces.

Misha Teramura — December 27, 2016

Reply

Bingo! See “Looking through the hole in a torn-open letter for details.

Erin Blake — January 3, 2017

Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *