The Collation
Research and Exploration at the Folger
The Collation is a gathering of useful information and observations from Folger staff and researchers. Read more about this blog
A ghost for Halloween
I’d like to say that I cleverly scheduled the installation of Benjamin Wilson’s William Powell as Hamlet encountering the Ghost for last Friday so that the Founders’ Room would have a ghost in time for Halloween. Unfortunately, there were witnesses…
Reading the romantics
What do Folger staff read in their spare time? Not necessarily Shakespeare! I’ve recently finished a wonderful book by Daisy Hay called The Young Romantics, published in the spring of 2010 and now available in hardback, paperback, or on a…
Undergraduate reports from the Reading Room
Today’s post features two accounts from students at The George Washington University who are in this semester’s Folger Undergradaute Seminar. Lyssa Meddin When I first heard about the Folger Shakespeare Library Undergraduate Seminar I was finishing up my freshman year…
Interrogating a hermit
Three months ago the Folger was lucky enough to acquire a letter from Thomas Cromwell to George Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury. I say lucky because while roughly 350 letters from Cromwell survive, almost all of them are at either the…
Q & A: Julie Ainsworth, Head of Photography and Digital Imaging
Julie Ainsworth, Head of Photography and Digital Imaging Although many readers at and visitors to the Folger Shakespeare Library might not know her name, most know her work. Julie Ainsworth, Head of Photography and Digital Imaging, is responsible for the…
Battling over 18th-century rights to Shakespeare
In working on the Shakespeare Collection NEH grant-funded project for the past year, I have learned more than I ever imagined possible regarding the history of eighteenth-century publishing, particularly the “Shakespeare copyrights” and ownership disputes between booksellers. The feud between…
The KJV, Ben Franklin, and Noah Webster
As part of the library’s celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible, the Folger Institute hosted a conference bringing together scholars from across the United States and the United Kingdom to discuss the effect…
Copperplate illustrations and the question of quality
While looking at early modern book illustration in the undergraduate seminar on Friday, we got to talking about the false assumption that copperplate illustrations always indicate better-quality publications, while woodcuts are inherently lowly. True, the raw material is more expensive:…
Folger Tooltips: Cover-to-Cover
Greetings, dear Readers This episode of Folger Tooltips covers a variety of methods for accessing cover-to-cover page images of early printed books and bound manuscripts from the Folger collection. At the moment there are three basic ways in: via Insight’s…
Cataloging and preserving the Shakespeare collection
Cataloging and Preserving the Shakespeare Collection is a three-year project at the Folger Shakespeare Library funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Catalogers are working to create and upgrade definitive records for the Folger’s more…
Guyot's speciman sheet
If you’re a type designer (or a type caster, to be more appropriate to the early modern period), how do you show people examples of your wares? You use a specimen sheet: On this sheet, we see a matched set…
Exhibition transformations
It’s that time of year again: for two weeks every four months or so, the Folger’s Great Hall locks its doors and transforms from one exhibition into the next. Or, perhaps that’s how it seems to Folger visitors and readers…