Collection The Folger houses the world's largest collection of Shakespeare-related material, from the 16th century to the present. The library is best known for its 82 copies of the 1623
First Folio (of which only 235 known copies survive) and over 200
quartos of Shakespeare's individual plays. Not restricted to Shakespeare, the Folger owns the world's third largest collection of English books printed before 1641, as well as substantial holdings of
continental and later English imprints. The collection includes a wealth of items related to performance history: 250,000 playbills, 2,000 promptbooks, costumes, recordings and props. It also holds upwards of 90,000 paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures and other works of art. The Folger's first catalog of its collection began in 1935, when Edwin Willoughby, a scholar of
library science and the First Folio, began to catalog the book collection based on
Alfred W. Pollard and
Gilbert Richard Redgrave's
Short-Title Catalogue. Though Willoughby developed a unique
classification system based on the Folger's needs, in the late 1940s the Folger adopted that of the
Library of Congress. In 1996, Folger staff and readers were given access to "Hamnet", the collection's first online catalog; the site became available to the public in 2000.
Printed books In all, the library collection includes more than 250,000 books, from the mid 15th century—when the
printing press was invented—to the present day. In addition to its 82
First Folios, 229 early modern quartos of
Shakespeare's plays and
poems and 119 copies of the
Second, Third, and Fourth Folios, the Folger holds some 7,000 later editions of Shakespeare from the 18th century to present, in more than 70 different languages. Beyond its Shakespearean texts, the library's collection includes over 18,000 early English books printed before 1640 and another 29,000 printed between 1641 and 1700. The library holds 35,000 early modern books printed on the European continent, about 450 of which are
incunabula. The topics of these texts vary widely, ranging across literature, politics, religion, technology, military history and tactics, medicine, and over 2,000 volumes on the Protestant
Reformation. These handwritten documents date from the 15th to the 21st century and cover a variety of subjects: documents related to performance history and literature, personal correspondences, wills, love letters, and other materials of daily life. Notable manuscripts include the
earliest known staging diagram in England, a list of quotations
George Eliot compiled while writing
Middlemarch, the 18th-century Shakespeare forgeries of
William Henry Ireland, and the papers of legendary 18th-century actor
David Garrick. The Folger hosts Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO), an
IMLS-grant funded project to digitize and transcribe English manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries in a freely available digital collection. EMMO holds conferences,
paleography classes, "transcrib-athons", and other events at the Folger and elsewhere.
Highlights of the collection on display at the library's museum Significant items in the Folger's collection include: • The only extant complete copy of Shakespeare's
Titus Andronicus first quarto, published in 1594 • The
False Folio • The
Macro Manuscript, a unique source for the three early
morality plays:
The Castle of Perseverance,
Mankind and
Wisdom. The manuscript also contains the earliest known staging diagram for any play in England. • The
Dering Manuscript, a single-play redaction of
Henry IV, Part 1 and
Henry IV, Part 2 that is the earliest known manuscript for any of Shakespeare's works. • The
Ashbourne portrait, the basis of several
Oxfordian arguments •
Henry VIII's childhood copy of
Cicero's
De officiis, bearing an inscription in his hand, "Thys boke is myne Prynce Henry" • The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608, an oversized illustrated manuscript of 594 pages, depicting everything from the mundanities of daily life to biblical stories to contemporary political history • The earliest
Sieve Portrait of Queen
Elizabeth I • Thirteen of
John Donne's letters detailing the personal crisis he faced upon marrying Anne More without her father's permission • Thousands of pages of letters to and from prolific 18th-century actor
David Garrick • A large and significant collection of letters, mostly sent to the influential German Shakespeare scholar F. A. Leo (1820–1898), many of which related to the early history of the
German Shakespeare Society, as well as a selection of German-language documents relating to Shakespeare. This collection was organized and edited by
Werner Habicht. ==Research and education==