Case numbers

Mr. and Mrs. Folger stored most of the material acquired for their future library in warehouses and safes in New York. Accordingly, individual items are associated with a "case number" indicating which packing crate they were in. The highest case number is 2067, but the schema was continued by early Folger staff and so quasi-case numbers extend to the 2200s. Folger catalogers record the case number as "cs" followed immediately by the number (no space) as if it were an accession number, but it is important to know that these are not unique identifiers. Everything else in that case will have the same number.

There are three series of numbers:

  • Case numbers: serial numbers from 1 through 2067 on typed lists
  • Circle case numbers: serial numbers from 1 through 42 on typed lists, and up to 128 in boxed catalogs. Handwritten numbers have circles drawn around them, typewritten numbers have parentheses on either side.
    • For manuscripts from these cases, Giles Dawson assigned them the numbers 2077-2118 in late 1932.
  • "S Lock" numbers (for "Safe Lock"?), numbered 0063, 0114, 0361, 0677, and 0900 in the boxed catalogs, and including 0822 in catalog records. No list has been found yet.
    • For manuscripts stored in Folgers' safes, Giles Dawson assigned them the numbers 2069-2076 in late 1932.

Dawson continued applying quasi-case numbers to manuscripts acquired by the Folger Shakespeare Library beginning with 2201 so that they would have unique identifiers in Seymour de Ricci’s Census of medieval and renaissance manuscripts in the United States and Canada and correspond to the printed de Ricci numbers. Manuscripts purchased by the Folgers that couldn’t be satisfactorily identified against their purchase lists were called “Lost numbers” and assigned the quasi-case number 2068.

The four-digit accession numbers used by the library from October 20, 1930 through August 31, 1938, are often mistaken for case numbers (so sometimes have "cs" in front of the number in the catalog). They can be distinguished from case numbers because they run from 3001 through 7029, while case and quasi-case numbers end in the low 2000s.