Books

Scenes of winter in the Folger collection, from snowy outdoor scenes to fashionable illustrations to mentions of winter in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Explore the (often biting) commentary that Victorian novelist Antony Trollope left in a copy of Marlowe’s plays.

Greg Prickman explains how news of the 1623 book we now call the  First Folio appeared a year earlier, on the occasion of a trade fair in Frankfurt, Germany.

Part 2 of the thrilling story about how Henry Folger acquired the Vincent-Sibthrop copy of the First Folio.

Did you ever wonder how Henry Folger acquired the copy of the First Folio that he considered “the most precious book in the world”? Wonder no more. Join Folger Archivist Sara Schliep on a two-part saga spanning over a decade and an ocean, both literal and figurative. Here is part 1 of the tale.

Why is there a picture of cooking bacon on this blog? Read on to find out what Heather Wolfe learned about Venice paper, early modern experimentation, and bacon.

Folger Fellow Adrian Finucane explores issues of captivity in John Smith’s writing.

Artist Eva Rocha’s multimedia work investigates processes of dehumanization and in this post she looks at early colonial depictions of “Original Peoples”.

a guest post by Eileen Sperry For early modern English Christians, dying was an art form. The bestseller list of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had there been one, would have been topped by some of the period’s many…

Thank you for your suggestions regarding these fingerprints. They are, indeed, the marks of two different fingers with different patterns. I tend to think, like Elizabeth, that they are the marks of a middle finger and an index or a…

In her 1616 mother’s advice book, The Mothers Blessing, Puritan author Dorothy Leigh exhorts her readers: “Teach a childe in his youth the trade of his life, and he will not forget it, not depart from it when he is…