crocodile mystery

Last week’s Crocodile was a jumble of household instruments with numbers next to them. As our first commenter, Katie Will, correctly guessed, the detail was from the table of contents of a type of heraldic manuscript known as an Ordinary.…

It’s the last day of the month, and our intrepid readers know what that means: mystery time! So for this month, we ask: why on earth would someone make a jumble of pictures of everyday items like this? And why…

The answer to last week’s Crocodile mystery is, as some of you guessed, £135 15s 0d (or 135 pounds, 15 shillings). This amount is a snippet of one entry made on a page in Folger MS V.b.308, the account book of…

Here’s a mystery of the Crocodile manner for May. The text shown in this image is one piece of a larger whole, but the question is what is it and how does it relate to the whole? As always, post…

Welcome to our April crocodile mystery! So tell us, dear readers, why this scrap of paper is in our collection, and what it might be?

A new month and a new mystery. We’ll keep this short and sweet: What, exactly, are we seeing in this image? Leave your thoughts in the comments here, and we’ll be back on Tuesday with the answer.

Welcome to the February crocodile mystery! We’ll jump right in: what is the image below? What does it represent? What does this have to do with Shakespeare?? Please share your thoughts, guesses, etc. using the “Leave a reply” box at…

As Jeff and Anthony commented on last week’s Crocodile Mystery, this picture is unusual because it is an engraved portrait copied from a photograph rather than from a drawing or painting. “Madame Celeste as the Princess Katherine.” Engraved by George Hollis from a daguerreotype by J.E.…

This month’s mystery raises the question of illustration technique, taking a portrait of Céline Celeste as Katherine in Shakespeare’s Henry V as an example. What makes this picture unusual, technically speaking? Please share your thoughts, guesses, New Year’s greetings, etc.,  using the “Leave a…

Yes. As our readers quickly reported, this month’s mystery image is the imprint on Procopius’s The secret history of the court of the Emperor Justinian. In fact, it is the imprint of the very first English translation of Procopius’s Secret work.…

It’s a new month and you know what that means! Mystery time! We’re sure this month’s mystery image won’t be hard for our intrepid and knowledgeable readers to track down. Ah, but finding out more than the title of the…

Here’s your crocodile mystery for October! As you can probably guess, the text below is only one line of a larger collection item. What kind of thing is the whole item an example of, and why is it in our…