Folger Collections

Senior Photography Associate William Davis shares his five favorite collection items in our new series: Folger Faves.

Porras, a Folger Artist Fellow, shares what inspired him, from the Folger collection to Indigenous futurism, in the creation of his new media work, de Bry’s Slipstream.

Take a look at our top five Collation posts from 2025. Thanks for a great year!

Seventeenth century resonances in a twentieth century postcard sent from Jamaica.

“Do not seek pleasure in music and singing” and other advice for widows from an early 17th-century manuscript.

An examination of marginalia in the Folger’s 1593 The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia

Folger Artist Fellow Missy Dunaway shares what she’s learning while working on The Birds of Shakespeare, her project to paint the 65 birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s works.

We revisit Victoria M. Muñoz’s November 2025 presentation as part of our Folger Book Club discussion of Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires.

Looking at enslaved Black workers and the 1588 Spanish Armada’s afterlives in a 17th-century English miscellany

We revisit Johnna Champion’s October 2025 presentation as part of our Folger Book Club discussion of Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill.

Ansel shares how her questions as an artist fellow about Fuseli’s take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth inspired her to create two abstract, large-scale oil paintings but this time from a woman’s perspective that celebrates the play’s sisterhood.

Have you ever noticed a decorated paper on a volume in our collection and wondered how it was made?