If you’ve been to our Reading Rooms this summer, you might have already had a chance to meet Melanie Dyer, our new Research and Outreach Librarian. But even if you don’t regularly make it in to the Library, you’ll soon have a chance to avail yourself of her handiwork as she starts developing guides to our resources, including our online materials.… Continue Reading
In some ways, this image is a perfectly ordinary one (well, ordinary if it’s possible to think of an autograph manuscript of Mary Wroth’s important sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus [Folger V.a.104] as ordinary):
Heather Wolfe was showing this image to the participants of the Folger Institute’s recent summer NEH institute, Early Modern Digital Agendas, as part of a transcription exercise.… Continue Reading
Co-written by Heather Wolfe and Bill Sherman
Margins are exciting places, full of possibility. Early modern authors use them to guide readers, emphasize important passages, and add commentary. Early modern readers use them to highlight memorable text and make notes on their reading. Early modern scholars like to hang out in margins in order to witness these interactions, and then draw conclusions about the particular reader(s) or work, or about reading practices in general.… Continue Reading
Eric Johnson is the Folger’s new Director of Digital Access, heading the new Digital Media and Publications division. He has developed successful projects and programs for U.S. Department of State, the Washington Times, the World Bank, the state of Georgia, and other public- and private-sector organizations. He is best known in the Shakespearean community as the creator of Open Source Shakespeare, one of the most widely-used online resources in the field.… Continue Reading
It is an understatement to say that the layout of most books doesn’t show much daring, and that academic publications are among the most dull in this respect. But solid content and tasteful form do not necessarily exclude each other, as is convincingly demonstrated by the Canadian book designer Robert Bringhurst. Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style is not only a poetical account of his subject, it is a beautiful object that reflects the importance of its content.… Continue Reading
A couple of weeks back I posted some images with the aim of destabilizing some of our assumptions about what early modern texts look like. In the mix was an image of a “big” book followed by a “tiny” one.
It was, I think, obvious even on the computer screen that the big book was big and the tiny one was tiny.… Continue Reading
