Q & A: Aaron Pratt, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Rare Books and Prints

What excites you about this position and working at the Folger?

I first came to the Folger in 2009 as a second-year MA student to join Mastering Research Methods, a year-long seminar organized by the Folger Institute. Then, while working toward my Ph.D., I attended an Institute symposium on the King James Bible, presented research from my emerging dissertation at a Folger conference dedicated to scholarship on bookbinding (“New Bownde,” 2013), and participated in a year-long seminar for grad students grinding away at their dissertations. Alongside each, I spent time in the reading room learning the early English collections and honing my own bibliographical literacies—ways of looking at books as artifacts to more fully tell the stories of how they were made and have circulated over the centuries. Each time, I found myself more fully part of a community that has shaped the development of my research and my broader professional identity. All of which is to say that the Folger has been central to my career in a way that no other single institution has. I’ve always had an eye on working here and am excited, perhaps above all else, to pay forward the access and mentorship opportunities I’ve been so lucky to have.

We know you are just beginning to explore the collection. Do you have a favorite item yet?

As a way to familiarize myself with our secure storage areas, I’ve been paging some old friends and peeking at adjacent books and prints while doing so. Just today, I revisited one of the Folger’s four copies of The London Prodigal (1605), Folger STC 22333 copy 2: it survives, almost untouched, in the stab-stitched “pamphlet” form in which the vast majority of early modern play quartos first circulated. Although almost no one still accepts the attribution, the title-page proclaims that the play is “By VVilliam Shakespeare,” making it arguably the earliest Shakespeare quarto that remains in this prototypical form. (Copies of Pericles (1609) at the Folger, Folger STC 22335 copy 1, and Richard II (1634), PFORZ 896 PFZ, at the Harry Ransom Center are the other two candidates for this distinction.) Other quartos have been bound and often rebound, usually out of a good-faith—though sometimes misguided—effort to preserve them. Front-to-back photos of the stab-stitched London Prodigal are available in our Digital Collections repository.

As one way to learn about materials I didn’t already know about, I’ve also been going through acquisitions that the Folger has made in the last few years. One highlight is a collection of sixty books that remain in sheets, most in the simple, once-folded form in which they were originally warehoused. These are copies that never reached a binder to be turned into readable volumes. The earliest in the group is an Austrian imprint from 1591 that was printed with both red and black ink. Find me at the Quill and Crumb (or, better yet, the Tune Inn down on Pennsylvania), and I’ll do my best to convince you that this thing is as cool, as historically valuable as I think it is. My predecessor, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, knew it was great, too: she acquired the group of unbound books in 2024.

What’s your approach to curation and exhibitions?

My overarching goal in all that I do as a curator is to provide researchers, students, and the general public with the access and tools needed to see early printed books as a vital form of historical evidence. When I select items to acquire—have added a few here already!—I do so with an eye toward research potential and then work with catalogers to describe them in ways that offer multiple points of entry: information about printing and paper variants and anomalies, bindings, bookplates and other ownership marks, reader annotations and bookseller inscriptions, letters and other documents that have travelled alongside them.

With exhibitions, it’s important to me that I not only use books and prints to tell compelling stories about the past but that I also emphasize, when possible, that there are things we don’t yet or may never fully know. There will always be more looking and thinking to be done, and I firmly believe that special collections libraries like the Folger are where much of that work needs to happen. People should trust Folger as an authority on Shakespeare and the early modern world, absolutely, but I don’t want people to leave the galleries thinking, “Well that’s that.”

Any interesting research projects in the works?

I’m currently scrambling to finish the introduction to Playbook Wills, a book that Kirk Melnikoff, Breanne Weber, and I have been working on for a couple of years now. The vast majority of plays from Shakespeare’s era that are available for us to read today are available because they were printed in the period, so it is at least in part to the printers and publishers of those editions that we owe them. Our volume will bring together wills and other probate documents associated with men and women in the book trade who quite literally made playbooks, from Fulgens and Lucrece in the 1510s to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio in 1647. These documents, which discuss finances, property, relationships, and occasionally specific business dealings and personal beliefs, offer otherwise unavailable windows into the lives of some of the most important figures in the history of English drama.

I also have two solo projects that I am eager to finish researching and put to bed. One, which I am planning as a long article, is on the retail experience of book-buying in early modern England. Presumably because going to a shop and buying books was such a normal thing for the people who did it, they didn’t think to offer much to future historians about what process of buying and binding books was like. I’m hoping to offer some clarity and extinguish some myths that have proven quite stubborn. The other is a book-length reassessment of the quarto playbook. In part another myth-busting effort, it resists a longtime tendency to think of quartos as “cheap” or “ephemeral”—even “subcultural”—and instead leans on evidence showing that playbooks were a vital part of England’s literary culture from the earliest decades of print and that they increasingly found long-term homes on the shelves of collectors. Rather than a break from quartos, I want to argue more fully than others have that the Jonson, Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher folio editions of the seventeenth century were in fact enabled by them.