Manuscripts
Don't try this at home (unless you are a professional brewer)
Here’s a little transcription exercise for our Crocodile readers: Folger MS V.a.429, fol. 29r. This is the title of a recipe in a book of culinary and medical receipts compiled between approximately 1675 and 1750 by a few generations of…
Is that bleed-through?
In some ways, this image is a perfectly ordinary one (well, ordinary if it’s possible to think of an autograph manuscript of Mary Wroth’s important sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as ordinary): Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (fol. 65r) Heather Wolfe…
Margents and All: Thomas Milles between manuscript and print
Co-written by Heather Wolfe and Bill Sherman Thomas Milles’s motto, inscribed at the bottom of the title page in Columbia University’s copy of An Out-Port-Customers Accompt (STC 17935), as reproduced on EEBO. It appears in print on many of his…
Shakespeare's personal library, as curated by William Henry Ireland
Co-written by Heather Wolfe and Arnold Hunt It’s every bibliophile’s dream. You’re in a bookshop, or maybe at a local auction, browsing idly along the shelves. It’s late in the afternoon and you’re just preparing to leave, when you spot a…
Annotating and collaborating
This month’s crocodile mystery was, as Andrew Keener quickly identified, an image from Gabriel Harvey’s copy of Lodovico Domenichi’s Facetie and (Folger H.a.2): Gabriel Harvey’s heavily annotated copy of Facetie (fol. 1v-2r) There is a lot that could be said about Gabriel…
Learning to write the alphabet
Learning to write the alphabet is one of the first stages of writing literacy. For early modern English children, this meant first learning to read the letters of the alphabet (printed in black letter) from a hornbook. Hornbook. Folger Shakespeare Library…
Pen facsimiles of early print
As the commenters on last week’s crocodile guessed, the mystery image showed writing masquerading as print or, to use the more formal term, a pen facsimile (click on any of the images in the post to enlarge them): pen facsimile…
Filing, seventeenth-century style
When we think of filing today, we think of digital files and folders, and manilla folders, hanging files, and filing cabinets. But what did filing look like in early modern England? How did people deal with all their receipts and…
A manuscript misattribution?
This post was originally going to be titled “Murder in the Archives” and was going to be about an account in William Westby’s 1688 diary (Folger MS V.a.469) of the discovery of a dismembered body found scattered on a dung…
A letter from Queen Anne to Buckingham locked with silk embroidery floss
No, it’s not Lady Gaga’s hairline or the frizz on one of those creepy troll dolls. These were not real guesses from our readers, but the musings of Collation editorial staff when faced with an absence of comments to our…
A third manuscript by Thomas Trevelyon/Trevilian
The author’s name in the Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608 (Folger MS V.b.232, fol. 264v); click image to enlarge in Luna. Many Collation readers are already familiar with the Folger’s Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608 (Folger MS V.b.232), and the fabulous Trevilian…
Such a lucky pretty little library...
First leaf of Visus Libelli (a little book of advices) We thought we’d kick off your weekend with an amusing and fascinating hybrid book that is ripe for research. The as-yet unidentified compiler of this late seventeenth-century, ca. 800-leaf volume,…