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:

Folger STC 17436, sig. H2r

As with nearly all photographs shared on this blog, if you click the image, a larger version will open in a new window. What might have looked like a smudge if you hadn’t enlarged the image, is now clearly a smudge worth paying attention to!  More specifically, it’s a smudge made up of individual lines and whorls, a smudge made by an inky printer’s fingers.  Read more →

First, my thanks to all of you who suggested new  names for this series on identifying objects in our collection. The best suggestion came from Jeremy Dibbell, on twitter, who found this perfect moment in Antony and Cleopatra:

LEPIDUS: What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?

ANTONY: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.

LEPIDUS: What color is it of?

ANTONY: Of it own color, too.

LEPIDUS: ’Tis a strange serpent.

ANTONY: ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet.

(2.7.43-52)¹

There are many things to love about this passage. But for my purposes here, what I love is that its self-referentiality (What does a crocodile look like? It looks like itself, of course!) mixes, at the end, with a warning that what be more self-referentiality (Tears are wet) can also mean something that points outside of itself (Don’t forget that crocodile tears aren’t to be trusted, and neither is Pompey). Part of the challenge in this series of posts is to give name to things that look like themselves, but it is also to understand the larger meaning of those items and to learn something from asking, “what manner of thing is this?”

So on to this month’s crocodile challenge:

(click to enlarge)

If you follow me on twitter, you might recognize this photo, since I tweeted it out when I came across this. But if you missed it then, leave guesses about the nature and message of this crocodile in the comments below!

UPDATE: Given the quiet comment thread below, perhaps I erred too far on the side of the unobvious this time! I’m not interested in the words on the page, although they do help make a joke about what it is that I am seeing, a joke that has to do with early modern printing practices and who works in the printing house.

1. New Folger Shakespeare Library, eds Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, New York: Washington Square Press, 1999. [↩]

A  lot of what we post at The Collation is weighty, chock full of information and detail and (I hope!) interesting facts about our collections, library work, and early modern studies. But sometimes all you want is to look at a picture, right? Or maybe chime in with your sense of why something is interesting, yes? So with this post we are inaugurating an occasional series featuring curious things from the Library, whether a collection item or something used to care for the collections. What makes this series different from our other posts is that I’m not going to tell you what you’re looking at! I’ll post an image of an object (or a specific detail of an object) and you’ll guess what it is. After a week or two, I’ll post the answer and a discussion of what we can learn from it.

We’ll start with one that’s not too hard  but that is still kind of fun to look at and talk about:

Click on the picture to enlarge it, leave a comment below telling us what it is, and get the discussion rolling by adding what you think we might learn from it. I’ll be back soon to reveal all!

By the way, I need a much better title for this series than “What’s that?!” so if you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments!

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