The Collation

While looking at early modern book illustration in the undergraduate seminar on Friday, we got to talking about the false assumption that copperplate illustrations always indicate better-quality publications, while woodcuts are inherently lowly. True, the raw material is more expensive:…

Greetings, dear Readers This episode of Folger Tooltips covers a variety of methods for accessing cover-to-cover page images of early printed books and bound manuscripts from the Folger collection. At the moment there are three basic ways in: via Insight’s…

Cataloging and Preserving the Shakespeare Collection is a three-year project at the Folger Shakespeare Library funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Catalogers are working to create and upgrade definitive records for the Folger’s more…

If you’re a type designer (or a type caster, to be more appropriate to the early modern period), how do you show people examples of your wares? You use a specimen sheet: On this sheet, we see a matched set…

It’s that time of year again: for two weeks every four months or so, the Folger’s Great Hall locks its doors and transforms from one exhibition into the next. Or, perhaps that’s how it seems to Folger visitors and readers…

Last Friday a much-anticipated package arrived at the Folger, containing a series of fifteen deeds describing the successive ownership of two adjacent properties on Fleet Street (“The King’s Highway”) in London from 1543 to 1735. Deeds can be tedious to…

Michael Witmore, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library With this post, we inaugurate a Q & A series with Folger staff. It seems fitting to start off with one of the most recent and most public members of the Folger…

Forty-five years ago, Folger Director Louis Wright used his annual report to describe the Library as a haven for student-weary faculty: The time has come when someone should give a word of commendation to long-suffering faculties, and provide them with…

Greetings Dear Readers! Welcome to the first in a series of “tooltips” about how to access and best utilize online resources for conducting research at (or away from) the Folger Shakespeare Library. New bibliographic records and finding aids, and new…

Conventional wisdom sets up two distinct experiences of Shakespeare’s plays: readers encountering a text, and audiences encountering a performance. The Folger recently acquired a 1995 version of The Tempest by London book artist Sue Doggett that complicates the distinction. Readers…

One of the great things about running the @FolgerResearch twitter account is pulling together the Wednesday Wunderkammer from the Folger Digital Image Collection. It’s a chance for me to explore what’s in the constantly growing collection, making new discoveries and…

Seventy-nine.  In the same year the Folger Shakespeare Library turns seventy-nine years old, it updates a number that since the founding of the library has helped define the strength of its collection. It’s the number that was found on all…