Is that bleed-through?
In some ways, this image is a perfectly ordinary one (well, ordinary if it’s possible to think of an autograph manuscript of Mary Wroth’s important sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as ordinary): Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (fol. 65r) Heather Wolfe…
Margents and All: Thomas Milles between manuscript and print
Co-written by Heather Wolfe and Bill Sherman Thomas Milles’s motto, inscribed at the bottom of the title page in Columbia University’s copy of An Out-Port-Customers Accompt (STC 17935), as reproduced on EEBO. It appears in print on many of his…
Measuring Hamlet and the golden section
It is an understatement to say that the layout of most books doesn’t show much daring, and that academic publications are among the most dull in this respect. But solid content and tasteful form do not necessarily exclude each other,…
Sizing books up
A couple of weeks back I posted some images with the aim of destabilizing some of our assumptions about what early modern texts look like. In the mix was an image of a “big” book followed by a “tiny” one.…
It's the details thnt matter
There were two odd things happening in last week’s crocodile mystery, which featured an opening from the first English edition of Nicolàs Monardes’s Joyfull newes out of the newe founde worlde (STC 18005). The first was the easier to spot, assuming you…
Noticing the weirdness of texts
Sometimes it’s fun just to look at books without worrying what they are and who printed them and what the text says. And sometimes, when you do that, you notice all sorts of ways in which they’re weird—they mix manuscript…
Proof prints, part two; or, Proofs and proofiness
Last month’s post from me (your friendly neighborhood art historian) looked at trial proofs and progressive proofs (see Proof prints, part one). As promised, here’s a look at a third kind of proof in printmaking: proofs that aren’t really “proofs” as…
The Single Vine Leaf, aka the "Aldine Leaf"
I have always been a devotee of the “Aldine leaf”, even long before I knew its exact name or where it actually came from, and I am still delighted spotting it in early modern typography or when it is expertly…
Shakespeare's personal library, as curated by William Henry Ireland
Co-written by Heather Wolfe and Arnold Hunt It’s every bibliophile’s dream. You’re in a bookshop, or maybe at a local auction, browsing idly along the shelves. It’s late in the afternoon and you’re just preparing to leave, when you spot a…
An alter'd case: An annotated copy of The Roaring Girl
A guest post by Victoria Myers The marks in the book The reason that I found the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copy of The Roaring Girl especially interesting is because it is completely marked up. Most of these marks are corrections…
Annotating and collaborating
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…
Proof prints, part one
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…