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marginalia

“Extravagantly Large Paper”
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“Extravagantly Large Paper”

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Author
Caroline Duroselle-Melish

While working on the exhibition “Age of Lawyers” (currently on view at the Folger Shakespeare Library), I came upon several interesting copies of Thomas Littleton’s Tenures, the first textbook written on English land law. There are five different copies of…

“Beloveed Plays”: A Sammelband of 1680s Quartos & Its Readers
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“Beloveed Plays”: A Sammelband of 1680s Quartos & Its Readers

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Author
Claire M. L. Bourne

A Guest Post by Claire M. L. Bourne A major fringe benefit of systematically going through so many books (1,300+) at the Folger last year, looking for typographic conventions and experiments, was encountering traces of use and reading that have…

An Example of Printed Visual Marginalia
right: image of eagle carrying away a wolf while a second wolf looks on; left: two separate images, one of a single wolf, the second of an eagle carrying off a wolf
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An Example of Printed Visual Marginalia

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Author
Caroline Duroselle-Melish

The Folger Shakespeare has recently acquired a copy of the 1706 English edition of the travel narrative A New Voyage to the North… (Folger 269- 090q), written by the French physician Pierre Martin de la Martinière (1637-1676?) and published posthumously…

Marginal calculations; or, how old is that book?
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Marginal calculations; or, how old is that book?

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Author
Heather Wolfe

I’d like to make a pitch for recording a specific type of manuscript annotation in printed books and manuscripts: the “book age calculation.” These calculations turn up frequently on pastedowns and endleaves, and sometimes right in the middle of texts.…

How an 18th-century clergyman read his Folio
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How an 18th-century clergyman read his Folio

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Author
Caroline Duroselle-Melish

The Folger Shakespeare Library has never acquired another copy of a Shakespeare Folio since the Folgers’ time—until now. We recently added number 38 to our collection of Fourth Folios (S2915 Fo.4 no.38). Published in 1685, this was the last of…

"This Play I Red" and other marginal notes on reading
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"This Play I Red" and other marginal notes on reading

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Author
Claire M. L. Bourne

A guest post by Claire M. L. Bourne As a long-term fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library this year, I have been surveying all the English playbooks in the collection—from 1500 to 1709—in order to understand changing conventions of dramatic…

Unwanted doodles in a Shakespeare quarto
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Unwanted doodles in a Shakespeare quarto

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Author
Heather Wolfe

Our new curator of early modern books and prints, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, and I were up in the conservation lab a few days ago, consulting with book conservator Adrienne Bell on the optimal opening for safely digitizing a quarto edition of…

Shorthand and snark: An unexpected journey through Virgil
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Shorthand and snark: An unexpected journey through Virgil

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Author
Abbie Weinberg

I joined the Folger just over two months ago, and one of the most delightful things about my new job as the Reference and Outreach Specialist (aside from the fact that I get to work at the Folger!) is that…

When is an inscription not an inscription?
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When is an inscription not an inscription?

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Author
Sarah Werner

Two folks identified the key elements of this month’s crocodile mystery in their comments: Misha Teramura correctly noted that the inscription in the middle of the page—“pp. 184-190 refer to the progress of religion westward toward America”—refers to George Herbert’s…

Surprised by Stanhope
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Surprised by Stanhope

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Author
Sarah Werner

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…

Click-clack and crocodile tears: an annotated Elizabethan dictionary
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Click-clack and crocodile tears: an annotated Elizabethan dictionary

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Author
Heather Wolfe

If dictionaries are still on your mind after reading in The Collation and elsewhere about the 1580 copy of John Baret’s Alvearie owned by George Koppelman and Dan Wechsler, then here’s another tri-lingual annotated dictionary to ponder: the intensively-annotated Folger copy of John…

Buzz or honey? Shakespeare's Beehive raises questions
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Buzz or honey? Shakespeare's Beehive raises questions

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Author
Heather Wolfe Michael Witmore

Shakespeare’s birthday week begins with a bang: two New York booksellers, George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler, announced that they have found Shakespeare’s dictionary. In their new book, Shakespeare’s Beehive, Koppelman and Wechsler present their reasons for believing that William Shakespeare…

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