2025 Folger Holiday Gift Guide

Find unique gifts for everyone on your holiday shopping list. We’re sharing some favorites from our online Folger Shop in this guide, just a small selection of what the Folger Shop offers. If you’re in Washington, DC, visit in person to shop an even larger selection—and enjoy savings, gift wrapping, bookmark personalization, and more on one of our Special Shop Days!

Plus when you visit the Folger, you can enjoy the festive decorations, free activities including special fun for younger visitors, delicious holiday treats in the Quill & Crumb cafe, and more during our annual Frost Fair, beginning November 28.

Pop-up holiday snow globe cards—holiday cabin and holiday snowflakes—from the Folger Shop. All photos by Deb Lindsey.

For the young—and young-at-heart—librarian

Run your own library at home with all your favorite books! My Library Kit makes it fun & easy to share books with friends and family. Or perhaps the readers in your life—a teacher, a friend, or family member—would enjoy a Bookmark DIY Kit with six colorful vegan leather bookmarks and stamps to create quotes from a favorite book, special dates, or the name of a loved one. Wooden “READ” Vintage Card Catalog Bookmark is a stylish and eco-friendly way to hold your place in whatever you’re reading.

Tea Time

Have a tea lover on your list? Tea Time Puzzle (1,000 pieces) features a variety of cozy tea time elements—tea pots, cups, and spoons—with 20 specially shaped pieces for an added challenge. Tom Parker Bowles’ Fortnum & Mason: Time for Tea is a fun, deeply authoritative guide exploring the history of tea, how to make the perfect brew or infusion—and even which teas suit your tastes, with 50 delicious recipes. Pondering the future? Tea Leaf Reading Cards teaches the ancient art of reading tea leaves.

Story Time

Beautiful picture books are a treat for young and old—two Shop favorites: Snowscape: A Winter Pop-up Book and Kate Messner’s Over and Under the Snow. An eight-foot-long puzzle game, Story Box: Create Your Own Fairy Tales, has players create their own fairy tales using 20 cards which can be interchanged to tell a different story each time you play. More family fun: Yuletide Forest Puzzle (500 pieces) which features a wintery holiday wonderland in the forest.

For the Ornithologist

For the bird lovers on your list, a Birds of Shakespeare notecard set from the series by Folger Artist Fellow Missy Dunaway. It features waterbirds—Great Cormorant, Grey Heron, Black-Throated Loon, and Osprey—with a Shakespeare quote referencing the bird on the card’s back. Charles Harper’s Birds & Words is a vintage collection of 60 illustrations of birds with humorous stories about each one by the renowned Harper’s Magazine illustrator. A great book for fans of mid-century modern aesthetics

For the Writer

The cover of a beautifully designed journal—in a smaller 5″ x 7 and a larger 7″ x 9″—is a Folger First Folio binding attributed to a German bookbinder working in London around 1800.  Just the Tip, a Lazyjack Press handmade Italian silk tie, has a clever all-over design of fountain pen nibs! Also available as a bow tie and pocket square. A colorful, illustrated book, Words: How William Shakespeare Changed the Way You Talk, introduces younger readers to the words that Shakespeare coined and the inner workings of the Globe Theatre and Elizabethan London.

For the Time Traveler

The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England is an entertaining, accessible guide to daily life in Elizabethan England. Acclaimed historian Ian Mortimer recreates the sights, sounds, and customs of the 16th century from the perspectives of both peasants and royals. A hand painted seven-inch wooden figure of Elizabeth I, made for the Folger by Brooklyn’s Goose Grease, is equally at home in the playroom or on the bookshelf; other figures include William Shakespeare, and sets of four of women trailblazers,  women in power, and writers of note (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe, and Langston Hughes). For the fashionable on your list, a handmade, pure silk habotai scarf depicts London from the time of Shakespeare, capturing the original 1616 image by Claes Visscher (which measures over seven feet wide) in full. Other scarf designs include a navy wool scarf featuring a pattern from the 1608 Trevelyon Miscellany plus cotton scarves of floral patterns in pink and blue;  a handmade, pure silk habotai scarf using endleaves from a 1637 edition of Shakespeare with a feathered paper motif, from a 1600 edition of  The Garden of Muses, and a quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen; and a handmade silk scarf inspired by the Plimpton “Sieve” portrait of Queen Elizabeth I and created exclusively for the Folger by the design studio of Hellen van Berkel.

For Game Night

Zounds! A Shakespearean Card Game takes players to London’s 16th-century theater scene to collect characters from 13 of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays and build the most valuable London theater season. Literary Charades features five literary categories: Classics, Bestsellers, Nonfiction, Book to Film, and Children’s Books. In the Slings and Arrows board game, the pen is mightier than the sword! Shakespeare and three of his characters battle in the Globe Theatre in the most outlandish match-ups imaginable.

For young Shakespeareans

Have a young person that is interested in Shakespeare or perhaps you’d like for them to be?

Out just in time for the holidays, a new book by Folger Director Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper, All the World’s Your Stage, offers an imaginative retelling of eight Shakespeare’s plays. From A Midsummer Night’s Dream and how they created the magic and fairies in Shakespeare’s theater to The Tempest and how they made the sounds and smells come alive on stage in the 1600s, the book unlocks the plays and the theater that produced them for readers today. Beautifully illustrated, with charming representations of popular characters and scenes from each play, and fun facts about the life and times of Shakespeare.

Recommended for ages 7 and up.

More Folger gift ideas

Give a 6Tix flexible subscription

Our new package of six tickets can be used in any combination to performances in Folger Theatre and Folger Consort’s 2025-2026 seasons. See the plays or concerts that you want at a time of your choice. Just call the box office when you’re ready to select your seats. Pay now, pick later, so easy!

Give a gift certificate

Good for tickets to any Folger program including Folger Theatre and Folger Consort performances, readings in the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series, and virtual events. You can choose any dollar amount and the gift certificate are good for three years from the purchase date.

Give the gift of Folger membership

Your friends and loved ones can enjoy the benefits and discounts of membership while supporting the Folger. For the teacher in your life, give a teacher membership which includes a subscription to Folger Teaching, online resources and professional development opportunities, special conversations, and more.

Thank you for shopping with us this holiday season. Every purchase supports the Folger Shakespeare Library.