A new month and a new mystery. We’ll keep this short and sweet: What, exactly, are we seeing in this image?
Leave your thoughts in the comments here, and we’ll be back on Tuesday with the answer.… Continue Reading
When Shakespeare was young and in love, he wrote a gushing letter to his bride-to-be, enclosing with it a lock of his hair and five verses. Or that’s what an audacious teenager in the 1790s would have us all believe.
The supposed love letter is the handiwork of forger William Henry Ireland. For those of you new to him, see Arthur Freeman’s account of his identification of the original Ireland forgeries at Harvard, and the Collation post on William Henry Ireland’s forged Shakespeare library by Arnold Hunt and me.… Continue Reading
I have been part of the team that has been working to create Shakespeare Documented, which launched on January 20, 2016. In the last few weeks before launch, one of my main duties became the creation the thumbnail image for many of the nearly 500 items that are showcased on the website.
What are thumbnails? In the context of a website, they are small images that represent larger images—sort of a preview, if you will, of what’s on the full image.… Continue Reading
Did you solve last week’s crocodile mystery? It’s a sonnet! A visual representation of the phonetic structures of Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. XXIX, to be precise (rotated sideways to be extra-mysterious).
The pattern was created by Marjory Bates Pratt in 1940, as one of her Formal designs for ten Shakespeare sonnets (Sh.Misc. 1128). In Pratt’s own words, “The designs in this book were constructed by means of a method intended to represent visually the basic sound-patterns of poetry.… Continue Reading
a Guest Post by Marissa Nicosia and Alyssa Connell
Since we launched Cooking in the Archives in 2014 we’ve been looking for chocolate. We love chocolate, our friends and family who taste our recipes love chocolate, and we were pretty sure that the readers of our historical food website would love chocolate recipes from the archives as well. We knew hot chocolate or drinking chocolate existed in early modern England, but it took us a while to find a recipe.… Continue Reading
Welcome to the February crocodile mystery! We’ll jump right in: what is the image below? What does it represent?
Please share your thoughts, guesses, etc. using the “Leave a reply” box at the end of this post. Check back next week for the reveal!… Continue Reading
As readers of The Collation know, the Folger welcomes scholars on fellowship, Folger Institute program participants, and individual readers to our reading rooms. But what our readers may not know is that each January, we open our doors to a special group of scholars, the Amherst-Folger Fellows.
This group consists of Amherst College undergraduate students, carefully selected through an application and interview process.… Continue Reading
In addition to the printed books and embroidered bindings described in last week’s post, the Folger also acquired 26 early modern manuscripts at the Robert S. Pirie sale at Sotheby’s (New York) in early December 2015. They should be arriving at the Folger soon, and we are eager to accession them, catalog them, and get them into the hands of our readers.… Continue Reading
The Folger Shakespeare Library acquired 45 lots, 19 of them printed books, at the auction sale of the Pirie collection that took place on December 2–4, 2015, at Sotheby’s, New York (we’ve also put up the complete list of our acquisitions from this sale).
As we described in our previous post about the sale, a great deal of preparation went into this auction, and part of that involved comparing our current holdings with the items offered in the sale.… Continue Reading
The latter portion of 2015 included a bit more excitement than usual around the Folger, as we gathered for several days in early December to feast (on popcorn, primarily), drink (coffee and tea), and engage in that most merciless of blood sports: buying at auction.
This occasion for festivity was Sotheby’s December 2015 sale of the magnificent collection of printed books and manuscripts belonging to Robert S.… Continue Reading
