The Collation

This month’s crocodile mystery was, as Andrew Keener quickly identified, an image from Gabriel Harvey’s copy of Lodovico Domenichi’s Facetie and (Folger H.a.2): Gabriel Harvey’s heavily annotated copy of Facetie (fol. 1v-2r) There is a lot that could be said about Gabriel…

The last few crocodile mysteries have zoomed in on details. Here, for a change of pace, we’re zooming out to a full-page spread: June crocodile (click to enlarge) In the past crocodiles have been about categories of objects, not necessarily…

Greetings Dear Readers! Today’s tooltip introduces new e-book resources we are in the process of rolling out through Hamnet, including: ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB), a nonprofit online collection of over 3,700 current and recent titles in the humanities, “offering a…

Last time I posted on The Collation (Two disciplines separated by a common language, 30 April 2013), I went off on a bit of a rant about vocabulary barriers between printed pictures and printed words. Guess what? There’s more! That…

The Folger Shakespeare Library has ten copies of the second edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets (STC 22344). All ten copies of STC 22344 in a row Engraved portrait (fol. p1v) and the first title page (fol. *1r) from copy 1 The…

Last month I wrote about a book—nay, a leaf of a book—and the secret histories it reveals about how it was made, from the growth of the tree that became the woodblock to the valleys and hills that formed during…

Learning to write the alphabet is one of the first stages of writing literacy. For early modern English children, this meant first learning to read the letters of the alphabet (printed in black letter) from a hornbook. Hornbook. Folger Shakespeare Library…

As the commenters on last week’s crocodile guessed, the mystery image showed writing masquerading as print or, to use the more formal term, a pen facsimile (click on any of the images in the post to enlarge them): pen facsimile…

Another month, another mystery for your riddling. What might be going on in this image? I’m not asking you to identify the text Revelation 21:1-6 but to look at it and speculate on what we might see and say about…

I should have seen it coming when the Art History professor and the English professor started talking with each other about “print culture” (names omitted to protect reputations). It soon became clear that one had been talking about the circulation…

Sheer chance is an important factor in research. Some sixteen years ago I was surveying a sammelband held at Antwerp University Library that contained 257 programs documenting theater performances in Jesuit schools in Flanders. For the results of this research,…

Editor’s Note, March 30, 2016: Sarah now is maintaining an up-to-date list of digitized First Folios on her personal site. When you’ve finished reading this post, please head over there to check out the current list. I imagine that you’re…