Photo Gallery: Collection Highlights

Under Gail Paster's leadership—she first encountered the Folger collection as a doctoral student researching her thesis—new acquisitions have reached their highest level in the library’s history. Among the more than 14,000 new additions are a 16th-century manuscript on magic that completed a grimoire already in the collection; a copy of Martial’s epigrams (Paris, 1617), owned and annotated by Ben Jonson; a rare bird’s-eye etching of London (ca. 1660) by Wenceslaus Hollar; the only broadside inciting the 1849 Astor Place riot known to survive; James Northcote’s 18th-century painting, Romeo and Juliet, act V, scene III: Monument Belonging to the Capulets; and watercolor costume designs for Derek Jarman’s 1979 film, The Tempest.