Adventures in Professionalization: Library Research at the Folger

As I mentioned in my previous post, I did some research at the Folger Shakespeare Library this month. In addition to learning many interesting facts and foibles about Elizabeth Inchbald, whose papers are owned by the Folger, I also had my first experience in traveling to a specialized library.

The Folger Shakespeare Library:
from the outside, it looks like an Italian Fascist masterpiece, ha ha.

Well, that is not exactly true…I traveled to the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto while working on my MA thesis on Margaret Atwood. That, however, was eight years ago, and did not involve getting a reader card—or tea and cookies at 3pm every day!

In any case, it has been a long time since I traveled to a library or archive to do specialized research, and my experience at the Folger was extremely positive. Of course, there are always various discomforts that attend such research: uncomfortable chairs and tables too high for typing comfortably on a laptop; only using pencils; freezer-level A/C, etc. On the other hand, the Folger has many aspects specific to itself that made it a particularly pleasant scholarly experience. 

As mentioned before, the Folger readers and staff have the option of tea, coffee and cookies at 3pm every day. Most folks go to the afternoon tea break, and it’s a wonderful opportunity for meeting the other readers at the library. You never know who you will run into! I had the pleasure of meeting, among many others, Jack Lynch from Rutgers, whom I already follow on Twitter but had never had the opportunity of meeting in person, as well as Lara Dodds, from Mississippi State and on whose roundtable I will be speaking at the MLA in January! It’s a small world in academia, as usual.

The beautiful reading room.

Aside from tea and cookies, the Folger reader room is beautiful and inspiring. Part of it looks like the library of an Elizabethan gentleman, complete with lots of dark wood, shelves of hardbound books, and leather-and-wood chairs that look like they are right out of a museum. There are busts of Shakespeare, stained-glass windows, and decorative motifs that would not look out of place in a Gothic church.

The librarians are very helpful, and although the website says that it can take up to 90 minutes to fetch rare materials, I never had to wait more than a half hour. I suppose it helps that I was there in summer and not during the school year. Still, I found the library fairly easy to use, quiet, and pleasant to work in.

My research itself was interesting, too, although I didn’t know how much useful information I would find. Doing archival research is very much a situation in which you don’t know what you might find or how useful it might be. For now, I think I’ve gotten what I need for my book project, but it’s comforting to know that I can return to the Folger whenever I’m in town again and take another look.

Going to the Folger is a great excuse to visit one of my favorite cities!