Folger Collections

A guest post by Sujata Iyengar Typography—the design of individual printed letter-shapes—makes printed books easier to read, and it can also shape our understanding and experience of the text and the content that an individual book contains. At first, early…

What do Robert Browning, Anna Maria Hall, Geraldine Jewsbury, John Ruskin, and Anna Swanwick, have in common? Quite a bit, actually. But in the Folger’s collection, they were the five “recipients” of Helena Faucit’s essays that formed the volume On…

Dr. Emma Poltrack shares the Folger collection items she presented on September 3, 2020 as an introduction to ‘The Shakespeare Requirement’ by Julie Schumacher.

Thanks to everyone who took a guess on this month’s Crocodile Mystery! As several of you pointed out, the teaser image is of some breed of cockatoo or cockatiel. Although I usually know a hawk from a handsaw, I will…

Dr. Emma Poltrack shares the items she presented to the Folger virtual book club on August 6, 2020 as an introduction to ‘Station Eleven’ by Emily St. John Mandel.

Thanks for the excellent guesses on the identity of the August Crocodile Mystery! If you’ll permit me to indulge myself, I’ll prolong the suspense a little longer by showing some examples of what it might have been, but isn’t (and…

A guest post by Kathleen Long (Editor’s Note: You can read Kathleen’s previous post, Dining with the Hermaphrodites, for a discussion of another aspect the novel.) The inhabitants of the island depicted in the 1605 French novel, The Island of…

Yes, indeed. The letters in this month’s mystery image are B, O, and G, and they represent what is missing from the image: color!  The mystery image is a detail of a coat of arms in Folger MS V.b.256, which…

Earle Hyman as the Prince of Morocco in a 1953 production of Merchant of Venice Earlier this year, the Folger Shakespeare Library was privileged to receive the Earle Hyman Collection, including many of the actor’s personal papers, photographs, and theatrical…

One of the points I like to make when I teach the History of Printed Book Illustration at Rare Book School is that images and words affect each other. The course deliberately focuses on illustrations—that is, on pictures and text…

“I may be losing what are left of my marbles, but in L.b.21 look at the middle wiggly bits of the brackets on the right hand side of 5r (second & third brackets), 5v (1st bracket) 6v (1st & 2nd…

In 1684, Bridget Trench bought herself a copy of the Rev. Samuel Clarke’s General Martyrologie, a collection of biographies of those who had been persecuted for their beliefs in the history of the church in England. Samuel Clarke, General Martyrologie…