The Collation

Paul Dingman started at the Folger Shakespeare Library in late May of this year as the Project Manager for EMMO (Early Modern Manuscripts Online). Before that, he served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Alfred University where he taught classes…

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…

Non-librarians out there, have you ever clicked the “MARC View” or “Staff view” link in an online catalog record? In Hamnet, the Folger’s online catalog, it’s the third choice at the top of each record. I vividly remember the first time I did.…

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…

What manner of thing might this be? As always, leave your guesses and questions in the comments below, and come back later in the week for the reveal! Update (8 September): The reveal is now up: http://collation.folger.edu/2014/09/constructing-volvelles/

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…

“It’s satisfying to put the pieces of a puzzle together when we can, but it’s just as exciting to think of the undiscovered treasures that might be hiding in this collection.”—Nadia Seiler Nadia Seiler (1978-2014) To be a great cataloger…

It’s official: pictures in the Folger’s Digital Image Collection are now licensed CC BY-SA! That is, they can be used under a Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0 International License, one of the two Creative Commons licenses “approved for free cultural works.” That’s almost…

In earlier posts I surveyed the use of “v” for “u” in titles and imprints of books printed in the Southern Netherlands. In both cases, this habit clearly faded out in the course of the seventeenth century. These findings, in…

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…

For the past seven months, a small team of dedicated colleagues here at the Folger have been working very hard to bring you a new online, interactive tool that we hope will inspire collaboration and serve the Folger community. With…

A guest post by Julie Park It’s been a critical commonplace after Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel to view the novel as the first literary form to represent psychological individuality in the context of everyday life. My research,…