The Collation

Research and Exploration at the Folger

Romeo and…

October 5, 2021 | By Elizabeth DeBold

Thanks for our many eagle-eyed readers and your attention to this month’s Crocodile Post. As several folks guessed, this is a French parody of Romeo and Juliet called Roméo et Paquette, published in 1773. This item is a new acquisition, purchased in 2019 from our colleagues at Antiquariat Inlibris in Vienna. As incredible as it may seem, the first translations of Shakespeare’s plays only began to appear in France in the eighteenth century.… Continue Reading
oil painting portrait of a 17th century white mine with brown hair wearing a white shirt and a dark robe on a dark background

Should we care where Lucy Hutchinson went to church?

September 23, 2021 | By Guest Author

A guest post by Crawford Gribben Over the last few years—and with the benefit of my summer Folger fellowship—I’ve been thinking about the network of friends and rivals that had at its centre the puritan theologian, John Owen (1616-83). Owen was one of the most productive writers of the seventeenth century, and the Folger holds one of the largest collections of his work.… Continue Reading
Color postcard of the Folger Shakespeare Library side by side with the reverse of the card, containing only a date written in blue ink

Postcards in the (home) archive: Folger postcards, 1937

September 21, 2021 | By Guest Author

A guest post by Stephen Grant Printed on picture side: FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY, WASHINGTON, D.C. 60063 Printed on address side: PUB. BY THE WASHINGTON NEWS COMPANY, WASHINGTON, D.C. FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY. Folger Shakespeare Library. East Capitol and 2nd Streets. This important addition to the cultural wealth of the nation was the gift of the late Henry C. Folger. The Collection includes more than 70,000 volumes, as well as pictures and other relics of the great poet’s life and work.… Continue Reading

The Folger G.K. Hall Catalogs, or How to fit an entire card catalog on your bookshelf

September 16, 2021 | By Julie Swierczek

I had the good fortune of learning to do scholarly research during the transition from card catalogs to Online Public Access Catalogs or ‘OPAC’s, as they are known in libraries. I have a particular fondness for card catalogs because they allow for precision and recall when searching. Keyword searches can retrieve an interesting scattershot set of results, but when someone stands in front of a card catalog and looks for a particular name, title, or subject, they can see exactly how many cards are in the catalog with the search term.… Continue Reading
th[us] passy[n]g [the] tyme

A briefing on brevigraphs, those strange shapes in early printed texts

September 14, 2021 | By Erin Blake

Most people reading this will know that “&” and “and” mean the same thing. Some will also know that the ampersand’s “&” shape originated from the handwritten word “et” (Latin for “and”). The  “e” and the “t” are combined into a single character, making “&” the best-known example of a brevigraph. Instead of writing out “et cetera” you can simply write “&c.”… Continue Reading