The Collation is a gathering of useful information and observations from staff and researchers of the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Folger is a world-class center for scholarship, learning, culture, and the arts, and this blog seeks to present bite-sized glimpses of the materials found within our walls, along with the questions and answers they prompt. The Folger’s collections include rare printed books, manuscripts, works of art, audiovisual materials, and modern scholarship, extending beyond the study of Shakespeare to early modern culture and the theatrical history of his plays. The posts you will find in the blog cover all of those topics, and more.
Curious about why this site is called The Collation? The term “collation” has myriad meanings (nearly a dozen in the OED; almost two dozen if you count the sub-definitions), all of which maintain some sense of the original Latin term confero “to bring together”: gatherings of people, of information, of sheets of paper to form a book. We wish to invoke all of these senses in the blog’s name: a place where people, ideas, and information can come together. Please check out the first post for a more detailed explanation to what collation means.
Wondering what are the books pictured in our header? “The books on our shelf” will tell you what they are and why they’re featured in the header.
The Collation welcomes comments from readers. Comments should respond directly to the contents of the post; comments will be held for moderation, and we reserve the right to delete comments that are off-topic, abusive, or spam. We will not publish any comments which are personal attacks against the author of the post, or against other commenters. In the spirit of collaborative conversation, we also prefer comments to be accompanied by a real name (e.g., Sarah Werner) or by a regularly used public pseudonym (e.g., Historiann or Dean Dad). Comments from anonymous or fictitious identities will be posted only at the moderator’s discretion.
This blog was begun in August 2011 by Sarah Werner, who acted as its Editor and lead writer until June 2015. Abbie Weinberg then took over and served as managing editor through 2023. Heather Wolfe is the current managing editor ably assisted by Morgan Ellison. Erin Blake, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Owen Williams, and Michele Silverman all provide editorial guidance.
A note about the images used on this site: Most of the images used in The Collation are of items in the Folger collections. Items from the Folger Digital Image Collection are taken by the Folger’s Photography Department and are identified with the relevant call number and linked either to Luna, the Folger’s Digital Image Collection, or to Hamnet, the Folger online catalog. Unless under non-Folger copyright, images from Luna are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This allows you to use our images without additional permission provided that you cite the Folger Shakespeare Library as the source and you license anything you create using the images under the same or equivalent license. For more information, including permissions beyond the scope of this license, see the Folger’s Permissions Policy.
Photographs not from the Folger Digital Image Collection are labeled with the photographer’s name and, where applicable, the item’s call number. These images may be reused according to the same CC BY-NA license that applies to The Collation, as described below.
Posts in The Collation are copyrighted by their individual authors and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Non-commercial entities are welcome to reuse the material here as long as it is attributed to the author of the individual post and to The Collation and Folger Shakespeare Library. For questions about reuse of this material, please contact us at collation@folger.edu