Manuscripts
Malicious teaseling: or how a simple reference question got complicated
We had seven excellent answers to the Crocodile, which included an image titled “Malice,” but not the text below it. The general consensus was that the cowering man was winding thread or wool off of a drop spindle. One of…
A recipe for brioche (knitting)
…a Collation KAL (knit-along). Cast on We built our friendship with knits and purls over coffee in the Folger Tea Room. Sharing patterns, exchanging techniques, and giving fiber recommendations are still staple conversation topics for us seven years after we…
This Post Stinks, or, ‘I hope that the stuff will not smell too vilely’
John Masefield has a burning question he needs answered. Literally. Writing from his home Hill Crest in Boar’s Hill, Oxford, the Poet Laureate asks theater production veteran Allan Wade a crucial question about staging his home theatrical production of Macbeth.1…
Who was a refugee in early modern England? The “Poor Palatines” of 1709
A guest post by Jeremy Fradkin Today’s Collation post is a little bit different. It showcases materials held in archival collections at the British Library and the National Archives, both in the United Kingdom. It is the product of an…
Re-discovering three-cornered notes
A couple of years ago, when I had Saturday Duty in the Reading Room, a group of early-19th-century letters came across the desk. I noticed right away that one of them had unusual diagonal fold lines: Folger Y.d.23 (82x), a…
Heraldic Colors
Yes, indeed. The letters in this month’s mystery image are B, O, and G, and they represent what is missing from the image: color! The mystery image is a detail of a coat of arms in Folger MS V.b.256, which…
Pandemic Paleography
“I may be losing what are left of my marbles, but in L.b.21 look at the middle wiggly bits of the brackets on the right hand side of 5r (second & third brackets), 5v (1st bracket) 6v (1st & 2nd…
A Wyncoll's Tale
Let’s face it, every special collections library has at least a few mystery items in the vault that are quietly passed down over the decades from curator to curator (or cataloger to cataloger, or acquisitions librarian to acquisitions librarian). These…
Mellow Yellow and 50 Shades of Grey: the challenges of bi-tonal images
Well, I’m afraid our mystery image might have been a little too mysterious. For those of you still playing along, the mystery image from last week is an image from a microfilm of Folger MS D.a.6 that seems to show…
The Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Verse Miscellany
A guest post by Betty Schellenberg Recently I’ve been exploring the very active literary lives of eighteenth-century lower gentry and middle-class individuals. Many of these socially obscure people not only composed and exchanged verse in manuscript form within their own…
The Wandering Soul: On Meeting Theadora Wilkin
A guest post by William Cook Miller While at the Folger Shakespeare Library over the summer, I came across a manuscript so exciting, so intriguing, so multifaceted, that I spent a full week combing through it, photographing it, trying to…
Let there be light! Kliegl lights on the New York Stage
Once again, I seem to have underestimated the level of esoteric knowledge held by our readers. Y’all are delightful (and I’m guessing have worked technical theater at some point…). Yes, yes, indeed. The Crocodile Mystery posted last week does seem…