The Collation

Research and Exploration at the Folger

Posts Tagged: marginalia

“Extravagantly Large Paper”

November 17, 2015 | By Caroline Duroselle-Melish

While working on the exhibition “Age of Lawyers” (currently on view at the Folger Shakespeare Library), I came upon several interesting copies of Thomas Littleton’s Tenures, the first textbook written on English land law. There are five different copies of Littleton’s book printed in London 1588 and 1591 by Richard Totell. The text in all of them lies in the inner top quadrant of each page, creating unusually wide margins on each side and below the text.… Continue Reading

“Beloveed Plays”: A Sammelband of 1680s Quartos & Its Readers

September 24, 2015 | By Guest Author

A Guest Post by Claire M. L. Bourne A major fringe benefit of systematically going through so many books (1,300+) at the Folger last year, looking for typographic conventions and experiments, was encountering traces of use and reading that have not been recorded in the copy-specific notes on Hamnet. Of all the books I consulted during my fellowship, B5326 (Copy 2), a sammelband of eight play quartos from the 1680s, has to be among my favorites.… Continue Reading
right: image of eagle carrying away a wolf while a second wolf looks on; left: two separate images, one of a single wolf, the second of an eagle carrying off a wolf

An Example of Printed Visual Marginalia

September 22, 2015 | By Caroline Duroselle-Melish

The Folger Shakespeare has recently acquired a copy of the 1706 English edition of the travel narrative A New Voyage to the North… (Folger 269- 090q), written by the French physician Pierre Martin de la Martinière (1637-1676?) and published posthumously around 1700. As the title indicates, the book was a sequel to an account of de la Martinière’s voyages to Nordic countries published in 1671.… Continue Reading

How an 18th-century clergyman read his Folio

April 23, 2015 | By Caroline Duroselle-Melish

The Folger Shakespeare Library has never acquired another copy of a Shakespeare Folio since the Folgers’ time—until now. We recently added number 38 to our collection of Fourth Folios (S2915 Fo.4 no.38). Published in 1685, this was the last of the four great printings of Shakespeare’s collected plays during the 17th century. It was followed in 1709 by the first “modern” edition, by Nicholas Rowe, who followed the Fourth Folio text but added scene divisions, stage directions, and a character list (dramatis personae) for each play.… Continue Reading

“This Play I Red” and other marginal notes on reading

March 5, 2015 | By Guest Author

A guest post by Claire M. L. Bourne As a long-term fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library this year, I have been surveying all the English playbooks in the collection—from 1500 to 1709—in order to understand changing conventions of dramatic typography over the first two centuries of printing plays. This is slow, painstaking work, but it is showing me that early modern typographic experimentation was often keyed to innovations in theatrical performance.… Continue Reading

Unwanted doodles in a Shakespeare quarto

February 11, 2015 | By Heather Wolfe

Our new curator of early modern books and prints, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, and I were up in the conservation lab a few days ago, consulting with book conservator Adrienne Bell on the optimal opening for safely digitizing a quarto edition of Henry VI, Part 3 (STC 21006a copy 1) in preparation for our “Wonder of Will” commemoration activities next year at the Folger.… Continue Reading

Shorthand and snark: An unexpected journey through Virgil

October 16, 2014 | By Abbie Weinberg

I joined the Folger just over two months ago, and one of the most delightful things about my new job as the Reference and Outreach Specialist (aside from the fact that I get to work at the Folger!) is that I have time and resources to start digging into my own research again. I am particularly interested in how classical texts have come forward to us through time.… Continue Reading

When is an inscription not an inscription?

October 7, 2014 | By Sarah Werner

Two folks identified the key elements of this month’s crocodile mystery in their comments: Misha Teramura correctly noted that the inscription in the middle of the page—“pp. 184-190 refer to the progress of religion westward toward America”—refers to George Herbert’s final poem from The Temple, “The Church Militant.” And David Shaw noted that the other inscriptions—“8652” on the top left and “A176” on the bottom right—look to be an accession number and a shelf mark.… Continue Reading

Surprised by Stanhope

September 16, 2014 | By Sarah Werner

My favorite encounter with a book is one where I think I know what I’m going to find, but then something else entirely happens. My most recent serendipitous encounter came thanks to a tweet: Sjoerd Levelt was tweeting some images for #FlyleafFriday and shared an image of one of the Folger’s books, a copy of Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning that has as its flyleaf the last leaf of John Selden’s Titles of Honor (STC 1166 copy 6): That’s pretty fun in and of itself (and you can see more images of the flyleaves and binding in our digital image collection), but Sjoerd noticed something else.… Continue Reading

Click-clack and crocodile tears: an annotated Elizabethan dictionary

May 13, 2014 | By Heather Wolfe

If dictionaries are still on your mind after reading in The Collation and elsewhere about the 1580 copy of John Baret’s Alvearie owned by George Koppelman and Dan Wechsler, then here’s another tri-lingual annotated dictionary to ponder: the intensively-annotated Folger copy of John Higgins’s Huloets dictionarie newelye corrected, amended, set in order and enlarged… by which you may finde the Latin or Frenche, or anye English woorde you will (London, 1572).… Continue Reading
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