If you’re a type designer (or a type caster, to be more appropriate to the early modern period), how do you show people examples of your wares? You use a specimen sheet: On this sheet, we see a matched set of roman and italic typefaces, each in three sizes. The roman (from largest to smallest, and from top to bottom) is in canon, double pica, and pica; the italic (zig-zagging from right to left to middle) is in double pica, great primer, and pica. (I’ll show some details below; you can also zoom in on the image in Luna.) What makes this specimen sheet particularly interesting is that it’s one of the earliest extant printed sheets, we know the type caster who made these typefaces, and it’s the earliest known sheet with English associations.
Author: Sarah Werner
myriad marginalia
This week in class I showed my students (too briefly) one of my favorite books in the Folger’s collections, a 1483 printing by William Caxton of John Gower’s long poem Confessio amantis, written some hundred years earlier. I do not love this book because of its text—if I confess that I’ve never read the poem, will you hold it against me?—nor because of its author. I think it’s pretty cool that it was printed by Caxton, the man who established printing in England, and of course, there’s always kind of a thrill to any incunabula, but that’s not it either. No, I love this book because of the traces of its later owners, traces that interact with the text, traces that are all about the book but not the text, and traces that seem to have nothing to do with anything. Here’s one set of marks that are fabulous: ((I…
Undergrads in the Library
Forty-five years ago, Folger Director Louis Wright used his annual report to describe the Library as a haven for student-weary faculty: The time has come when someone should give a word of commendation to long-suffering faculties, and provide them with a refuge from the slings and arrows of outrageous students. We are glad that the Folger Library can qualify as a mind-saving station for scholars weary with the task of trying to stir the undergraduate mind to rational understanding. ((“Mind-Saving Stations,” Report from the Folger Library, February 1966)) If that was true in 1966, it’s certainly not today, when the stirring of undergraduate minds is something that happens inside the Library, in seminars and cheek-by-jowl with their professors in the Reading Rooms.
why blog once when you can blog twice or even thrice?
A quick update for those of you who have missed my online promotions: I am now in charge of a new blog at work, The Collation: a gathering of scholarship from the Folger Shakespeare Library. It is what it says it is, a blog authored by staff and scholars at the Folger that shares research and resources at the Library in terms that are accessible to the general public and of interest to scholars. If you’re interested in the early modern aspects of what I write here, you’ll like The Collation, too. But it’s not all early modern! We’ll be touching on aspects of librarianship, digital curation, theatre history, and humanities research. I wrote the introductory post on the word “collation” as well as a later post about my tweeting the @FolgerResearch #wunderkammer series. There are also posts so far from Steve Galbraith, the recently departed Curator of Books, ((“recently departed”…
Browsing the #wunderkammer
One of the great things about running the @FolgerResearch twitter account is pulling together the Wednesday Wunderkammer from the Folger Digital Image Collection. It’s a chance for me to explore what’s in the constantly growing collection, making new discoveries and highlighting some of the things that catch my eye. It’s a different sort of interaction with the Folger’s collections than I usually have. As a scholar and a teacher, I am usually looking for something specific—a book by a particular author, a work on a certain subject, an object with specific characteristics. But in doing the #wunderkammer, I get to browse and experience the collection serendipitously. It’s a joy to shift gears from searching to browsing and to look at something for no more reason than it tickles my fancy. Yesterday, for instance, I tweeted about a recently digitized mid-sixteenth-century six-language dictionary: Get ready for school with a mid-16C dictionary…