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The Collation

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

"What manner o' thing is your crocodile?": July 2014
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"What manner o' thing is your crocodile?": July 2014

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The Collation

Just in time for the holiday weekend, a new crocodile mystery! your July mystery   This month’s crocodile mystery will be, for many of you, obvious as a category of object. So there’s an extra challenge: what else can you…

William Dethick and the Shakespeare Grants of Arms
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William Dethick and the Shakespeare Grants of Arms

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Nigel Ramsay

A guest post by Nigel Ramsay For many visitors to the Folger’s Heraldry exhibit, “Symbols of Honor,” the stars will be the three original draft grants on paper of Shakespeare’s coats of arms. These belong to the English heralds’ long-established…

An argent lion rampant: coats of arms in 17th-c. books
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An argent lion rampant: coats of arms in 17th-c. books

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Goran Proot

In recent months, the Folger Shakespeare Library added a rare emblem book to its holdings, a thin quarto bound in pasteboards holding 24 unnumbered leaves . The emblem book presents itself as a “new year’s gift” containing 13 engravings: one coat…

Let's make a model!
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Let's make a model!

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Heather Wolfe Jana Dambrogio

Co-written by Heather Wolfe and Jana Dambrogio In 2010, Jana Dambrogio and I were thinking independently about slits and stabs in early modern letters. Jana, after having had made many models of the letters of Tomaso di Livieri from the…

Fun in cataloging, or, the mysterious 12mo
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Fun in cataloging, or, the mysterious 12mo

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Author
Deborah J. Leslie

On occasion, interesting and unusual aspects of books, manuscripts, and prints catch the attention of the cataloger at work on them. One such item was written up by Sarah Werner last December in “‘Tis the season for almanacs.” The office of the…

Hidden notes, "bibliographic nightmares," and STC call numbers
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Hidden notes, "bibliographic nightmares," and STC call numbers

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Erin Blake

Sometimes when keyword searching Hamnet, the results include mystery matches: when you Ctrl-V to find the word you’re looking for on the page, it’s not there. That’s because some fields only display on the “MARC view” tab. Usually the information isn’t worth…

Four states of Shakespeare: the Droeshout portrait
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Four states of Shakespeare: the Droeshout portrait

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Sarah Werner

So the mysterious eye of this month’s crocodile belongs to no other than Shakespeare, as some readers immediately recognized: Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare on the title page of the First Folio More specifically, it is Shakespeare’s left right eye as depicted…

"What manner o' thing is your crocodile?": June 2014
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"What manner o' thing is your crocodile?": June 2014

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Author
The Collation

For your June crocodile mystery, something to cast your eye over: I spy with my little eye, this crocodile mystery What is this, how many pertinent details can you point to, and why might it matter? Leave your guesses below and come…

Steady sellers
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Steady sellers

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Goran Proot

Recently, Jan van de Kamp, a scholar from the Netherlands, contacted me with the question of whether I knew a method to extract all religious steady sellers from the Short Title Catalogue, Netherlands (STCN). He would like to use that…

Making a Karibari board
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Making a Karibari board

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Rhea DeStefano

In conservation, the drying or humidification of paper poses particular challenges when dimensional and visual characteristics of the original paper are to be retained. Because of this, the drying of an artifact is a key step in its treatment. There…

Timon of Athens: nine not-actually-lost drawings by Wyndham Lewis
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Timon of Athens: nine not-actually-lost drawings by Wyndham Lewis

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Erin Blake

In 1998, modernist art and literature scholar Paul Edwards wrote about “a set of watercolours and (apparently) ink drawings on the theme of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens” by Wyndham Lewis that had been published as a portfolio in 1913. Paul Edwards, “Wyndham…

A digital adieu
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A digital adieu

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Jaime McCurry

The time has come for me to say farewell as my National Digital Stewardship Residency placement at the Folger Shakespeare Library comes to a close later this month. It has been a wonderful nine months working with born-digital assets here…

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