Folger Collections
The game's the thing
See examples of creative and beautifully illustrated card games and board games in the Folger collection that use Shakespeare quotes and make references to his plays.
The Guild of Women-Binders and the "bindings of tomorrow"
It’s not uncommon for me to encounter small presses, publishers, and binderies with which I’m unfamiliar in the course of my regular work at the Folger. However, few of them have as intriguing a story as the Guild of Women-Binders,…
From the Archives: Shakespeare in the USSR
Since (and even before) our founding in 1932, Folger Shakespeare Library staff has come together with a wide variety of arts and humanities organizations to celebrate the powerful nature of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Shakespeare’s works represent a literary place…
The Folger as a Collection of Collections
The next time a scholar of early modern Europe tells you that they don’t look to the Folger as their research home because they don’t work on Shakespeare, you might gently suggest that there are other parts of the Folger’s…
A Yellow Book
Thank you to those who have tried to solve this month’s Crocodile mystery regarding the yellow color of a book, which can be found in the Stickelberger collection of Reformation at the Folger Shakespeare Library (more on this collection in…
Costumes in 'As You Like It'
Were it not better, Because that I am more than common tall, That I did suit me all points like a man? Much of the love-lorn humor in As You Like It comes from Rosalind’s male disguise, but she’s not…
A New ASECS-Folger Short Term Fellowship
The Folger Institute is delighted to announce a fellowship in partnership with the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. This $2,500 award will allow its recipient a one-month residency at the Folger Library in Washington, DC. The fellowship is interdisciplinary, and…
Manuscripts in libraries: catalog versus finding aid
When searching for manuscripts at the Folger—or pretty much any special collections library—it helps to know that manuscripts often lead a double life. Many exist simultaneously as part of a library, and as part of an archive, and libraries and archives have different…
Announcing a New Fellowship with the Omohundro Institute
The Folger is known for our Shakespeare collections, but our holdings support research on all aspects of British and European literary, cultural, political, religious, theatrical, and social history from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries: and that includes materials that…
A promptbook in disguise
It’s time to pull back the curtain on last week’s crocodile mystery: that weird woven material is a close-up photograph of the cover of a promptbook! Both commenters who took a guess last week came pretty close. This particular promptbook was…
Announcing EMMO's Beta Launch
To kick off the new year at Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO), the EMMO team (Paul Dingman, Mike Poston, Sarah Powell, Caitlin Rizzo & Heather Wolfe, with additional thanks to Rebecca Niles) is thrilled to announce the launch of our…
Play scripts as you like them
Promptbooks help stage managers and actors keep their, er, act straight. Explore these ‘As You Like It’ promptbooks from the Folger collection.