As the commenters on last week’s crocodile guessed, the mystery image showed writing masquerading as print or, to use the more formal term, a pen facsimile (click on any of the images in the post to enlarge them): It’s telling that two of the three guesses focused not on the blackletter but on the roman font and the decorated initial. Both of those aspects, I think, are easier to spot as being somehow “off” in comparison to what we expect from print. But we’re not so used to looking at blackletter, and so a manuscript facsimile of that type isn’t quite as tell-tale. This is particularly true when the facsimile doesn’t have the print nearby as a point of comparison, but the difference isn’t necessarily glaring even looking across the gutter to the early printed page:
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.
First Folios online
I imagine that you’re all thinking the same thing I’m thinking in the lead-up to April 23rd, Shakespeare’s birthday/deathday: Where can I find a good online facsimile of the First Folio? And I’m here to tell you the answer: In many places! In fact, by my count, there are at least seven eight nine ten eleven different copies of the First Folio that are online in at least reasonably high-resolution facsimiles. But here we must pause a moment, in case there are some of you wondering a) why would one need a high-quality online facsimile of F1 and b) why would one be so excited that there were so many? And I can tell you the answer to this, as well, based on my own experience. Recently I was working on an edition of The Taming of the Shrew and was comparing my text with that of the Folio to make sure I’d caught and…
Secret histories of books
This month’s crocodile mystery was a bit more challenging than recent ones (perhaps not helped by my cryptic “suitable for April” introduction), but Aaron Pratt guessed the gist of it: the image was a detail of a page printed in black, usually referred to as a mourning page. Here is the full context, with the bit we were looking at taken from the middle of the left-hand page:
The seven ages of man, rendered movingly
In my last post, I described this month’s crocodile mystery as more of a rhetorical device than a question to be answered: what does this box prompt us to imagine what might be? ((All images in this post can be viewed in larger sizes through the gallery at the end.)) And what does it contain? Both a stage and a book. But it’s not just any stage and not just any book. The Globe Theatre is the setting for a miniature book that picks up on all the possibilities of staging: “Presenting the Seven Ages of Man / by Mr William Shakespeare / As Rendered Movingly by Mrs. Maryline Poole Adams.”
“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”: March 2013
I’m a bit early with the March crocodile, but sometimes it’s hard not to wish February done. And so here’s another variation on our crocodile mystery theme, this time asking you not what an item is, but what it might be. It wouldn’t take long to guess that this is some sort of box, so I’m not going to ask what it is. (It’s a box.) One of the things to like about boxes is that they hide what is inside them. There’s a world of possibilities in the moment before you open a box. Perhaps it’s akin to the world of possibilities we encounter before we open a book for the first time, or see an item we’ve called up from the stacks. Sometimes that moment of curiosity and anticipation is the driving force behind pleasure and scholarly research. Think of this, then, as a crocodile that prompts you to…