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Art

Art in the Folger collections
Woodcut, engraving, or what?
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Woodcut, engraving, or what?

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Erin Blake

When a reader needs  to verify the printmaking technique behind an early modern book illustration, I’m always happy to grab my favorite 10x loupe and head up to the Reading Room to have a closer look. By popular request, here…

Wagner and Shakespeare meet in Bayreuth
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Wagner and Shakespeare meet in Bayreuth

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Erin Blake

Back in August, I posted about a unique artists’ book  from 1995. Today, I’d like to showcase an example from the other end of the twentieth century, an artists’ book created in 1908 by American painter Pinckney Marcius-Simons (1867–1909). In…

A Trip to the Fair
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A Trip to the Fair

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Erin Blake

Every November, the International Fine Print Dealers’ Association (IFPDA) holds a fair at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. Colloquially known as the New York Print Fair, almost 100 dealers from the US, Canada, and Europe bring a selection from…

A ghost for Halloween
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A ghost for Halloween

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Erin Blake

I’d like to say that I cleverly scheduled the installation of Benjamin Wilson’s William Powell as Hamlet encountering the Ghost for last Friday so that the Founders’ Room would have a ghost in time for Halloween. Unfortunately, there were witnesses…

Copperplate illustrations and the question of quality
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Copperplate illustrations and the question of quality

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Erin Blake

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:…

Sue Doggett's The Tempest, a unique artists' book
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Sue Doggett's The Tempest, a unique artists' book

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Erin Blake

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…

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