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Folger Collections

Learning to "read" old paper
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Learning to "read" old paper

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Erin Blake

Have you ever wished there were a summer camp for bookish grown-ups? A retreat where we can spend a week amongst our own and not worry about being teased for loving libraries or getting hit in the glasses by a…

Bell's nightmare continued
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Bell's nightmare continued

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Carrie Smith

This post is a continuation of “John Bell, bibliographic nightmare.” I began to write these posts while entrenched in the difficult task of cataloging the library’s myriad copies of Bell’s 18th-century Shakespeare publications as a means of sharing a look into…

Pew-hopping in St. Margaret's Church
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Pew-hopping in St. Margaret's Church

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Heather Wolfe Kathleen Lynch

Manuscripts of unusual shapes and sizes are always fun to investigate, and we recently had the opportunity to reevaluate a particularly large and interesting one, a ca. 1600 “pew plan” written on a piece of parchment (Folger MS X.d.395), in…

Binding clasps
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Binding clasps

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Sarah Werner

Some close observation and deductive reasoning led commenters in the right direction in solving the June crocodile mystery. Here’s image that I posted last week, with a bit more context: With that bit of the surrounding context, it’s much clearer…

John Bell, bibliographic nightmare
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John Bell, bibliographic nightmare

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Carrie Smith Sarah Werner

Some books are more challenging than others; some bibliographic questions are more complicated than others. This is the first of two posts that looks at a particularly challenging cataloging question. Today’s post will set up the challenge; the next one…

Thomas Shelton's shorthand version of the Lord's Prayer
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Thomas Shelton's shorthand version of the Lord's Prayer

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Author
Heather Wolfe

Commenters to last week’s post, Heirloom apples and pears, anyone?, correctly identified the shorthand text found in Henry Oxinden’s miscellany (Folger MS V.b.110) as the Lord’s Prayer written out according to Thomas Shelton’s method of shorthand, called tachygraphy. Below is…

Colored print or color print?
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Colored print or color print?

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Author
Erin Blake

Consider the following physical description in Hamnet, the Folger’s online catalog (it’s for an edition of Anna Jameson’s Characteristics of women, also published as Shakespeare’s heroines): xl, 340 p., leaves of plates : col. ill. ; 28 cm. The first…

Heirloom apples and pears, anyone?
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Heirloom apples and pears, anyone?

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Author
Heather Wolfe

We’ll begin with another crocodile-style challenge in this post, from a manuscript miscellany compiled by Henry Oxinden (or Oxenden) (1609-1670) of Barham, Kent, Folger MS V.b.110. Here’s a detail from p. of the miscellany: Can anyone identify what this text…

A book's fingerprints
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A book's fingerprints

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Sarah Werner

Last week’s crocodile mystery may have been a bit too mysterious, but I hope that today’s post will inspire you to look for similar mysteries on your own. Here’s a close-up detail of what I was asking about: As with…

News of St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572
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News of St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572

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Author
Erin Blake

When the Swann Auction Gallery catalog for the March 15 sale crossed my desk, I flipped through as usual, looking for things that might fit the Folger’s collection development policy. I wasn’t paying too much attention, since it was primarily…

Dye to live, live to dye
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Dye to live, live to dye

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Author
Heather Wolfe Margaret Hannay

The Folger has recently acquired some interesting hybrid books; that is, books which consist of a mixture of thematically-connected printed, manuscript, and graphic material gathered from a variety of sources into a single binding. Sidney scholar and Folger reader Margaret…

Rehousing our tinsel print collection
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Rehousing our tinsel print collection

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Author
Rhea DeStefano

Tinsel prints are a unique English art form from the early and mid-19th century. They are typically composed of metal foils, fabric scraps, leather, feathers, and any other suitable material glued onto printed portraits of actors and actresses. Theatrical tinsel…

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