Last week’s crocodile mystery may have been a bit too mysterious, but I hope that today’s post will inspire you to look for similar mysteries on your own. Here’s a close-up detail of what I was asking about: As with nearly all photographs shared on this blog, if you click the image, a larger version will open in a new window. What might have looked like a smudge if you hadn’t enlarged the image, is now clearly a smudge worth paying attention to! More specifically, it’s a smudge made up of individual lines and whorls, a smudge made by an inky printer’s fingers. One of the reasons that I didn’t share only this detail in last week’s post is that I wanted the whole context for the fingerprint to be visible. The assistants in a print shop have long been known as printer’s devils, a name assumed to stem from…
Category: The Collation
Posts first published on The Collation, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s blog. The original posts and comments can be found by substituting “collation.folger.edu” for “sarahwerner.net/blog” on the individual post urls.
“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”: May edition
First, my thanks to all of you who suggested new names for this series on identifying objects in our collection. The best suggestion came from Jeremy Dibbell, on twitter, who found this perfect moment in Antony and Cleopatra: LEPIDUS: What manner o’ thing is your crocodile? ANTONY: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. LEPIDUS: What color is it of? ANTONY: Of it own color, too. LEPIDUS: ’Tis a strange serpent. ANTONY: ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet. (2.7.43-52) ((New Folger Shakespeare Library, eds Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, New York: Washington Square Press, 1999.)) There are many things to love about this passage. But for my purposes here,…
What’s that?!
A lot of what we post at The Collation is weighty, chock full of information and detail and (I hope!) interesting facts about our collections, library work, and early modern studies. But sometimes all you want is to look at a picture, right? Or maybe chime in with your sense of why something is interesting, yes? So with this post we are inaugurating an occasional series featuring curious things from the Library, whether a collection item or something used to care for the collections. What makes this series different from our other posts is that I’m not going to tell you what you’re looking at! I’ll post an image of an object (or a specific detail of an object) and you’ll guess what it is. After a week or two, I’ll post the answer and a discussion of what we can learn from it. We’ll start with one that’s not too…
modern adventures in printing
In keeping with the spirit of my last couple of posts, this one is also about printing, but this time as an activity that my students and I did in our Books and Early Modern Culture seminar. The Folger is lucky to have a small-scale replica hand press, thanks to the resourcefulness of Steve Galbraith, our former Curator of Books, who tracked down the work of a group of engineering students from Bucknell who had designed and built the press for a senior project, and who then built a second one for us. The Library’s used the press as part of exhibits, in demonstrations for Shakespeare’s Birthday celebration, and with students. Usually there’s only time for students to set their names in type and to print off a single broadside. But this time, I decided that there was room in the syllabus to try a bigger experiment: choosing a text,…
correcting mistakes
In my last post, I wrote about my joy in finding printer’s errors and what we might learn from them about early modern printing. In this one, I want to look at some examples of what printers do to correct their errors. Mistakes happen, as I tell my kids; it’s what you do about your mistakes that matters. So, what do you do when you make a mistake? You fix it! In most cases, you’d hope that the error came to light during a proof stage so that you can correct it before you start your print run. Sometimes, however, you find mistakes during a print run; in that case, you can stop the press to replace the incorrect type with correct type. (“Stop the presses!”) The petition I wrote about in the last post, where I was focused on the curious shadow-type, is also a good example of the different…