Browse Exhibits (32 total)

Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s-2020

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Poster for H. George Fletcher's exhibition titled Judging a Book by Its Cover

The bookbinding was an intrinsic part of the change from roll to codex, generally assigned to the North African littoral in the 3rd or 4th century C.E. This new form, the book as we know it, with its gatherings of leaves, required something to hold those gatherings together and to protect the contents. The solution was covers, likely of wood: the etymology of the term codex reflects its derivation from the Latin for tree trunk, caudex.

Bookbindings have always exerted a strong appeal on bibliophiles, constituting a major genre in collections of manuscripts and printed books. This has been especially the case at The Grolier Club. Our founding members, beginning exactly 140 years ago in January 1884, were motivated to create and foster the Club because of their sense of bookish congeniality among the like-minded. It is clear from the historical record that they were particularly anxious about the contemporary situation involving the clothing of books. The domestic scene was discouraging: current productions employed acidic paper with trade bindings reflecting only too well the heavy-handed styles of the era. The treatment of rare books and manuscripts was essentially worse – style overcoming substance, bookblocks encased in straightjackets that discouraged or deterred use of the contents, often unsympathetic décor.

While the acceptable solution then was to have one’s rarities bound or rebound in France, or in England by binders attuned to French taste and methods, this raised the specter of entrusting rare works to the vagaries of transatlantic shipping. (Rare books were among the losses on the Titanic, to mention a famous instance.) A select few of our founders called into being The Club Bindery, persuading accomplished specialists, primarily French, to move to New York to fill this need.

Over the scores of years, the Club and our members have nurtured the craft of bookbinding by collecting historic examples, fostering the creation of new work by emerging artistbookbinders, and hosting scores of exhibitions. The collection is overwhelmingly the result of members’ generous gifts, from our early days to the present. The current installation, a large selection of both carefully preserved and overly loved examples, reflects our stewardship.

H. George Fletcher

Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction

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Poster for Jefferey Johnson's Grolier Club exhibition titled Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction

I suppose the Hardy Boys Mysteries – with matching blue spines lined up in order on my homemade bookshelf – were the first indication that I was born to be a book collector. I enjoyed reading the books, but I equally enjoyed looking at them. I became a book accumulator. In college, I wrote away to request rare book catalogues and read every word when one came in the mail. I could afford little, but I did buy a few things that I still have today.  

Fast forward to the mid-2000s. I was settled into my career as an architect, and my son was growing up.  On vacation, I read the Goldstones’ Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World. It rekindled an old spark in me, and I was anxious to get home to review the contents of my bookshelves. When I did, I gave away dozens of books to the local library sales drives and decided to begin collecting in earnest.  

As is true of most novice collectors, my initial scope was too broad. I finally focused on two areas of collecting. One was fiction writers who had a connection to my home city of Knoxville. These included the well-known (James Agee and Cormac McCarthy), the surprising (Frances Hodgson Burnett), the forgotten (nineteenth-century humorist George Washington Harris), and the should-have-been (Tennessee Williams, whose father was a Knoxvillian but also a traveling salesman – hence Williams’s birth in Mississippi).  

The other, broader focus of my collecting was mystery novels. I thought it would be fun to collect the first novels of mystery writers, knowing that generally the print runs would be smaller, the voice fresher, and the characters more vividly drawn. As a guide in this activity, I used the winners and finalists in the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel. One day, I decided to order my first “expensive” book, from Baltimore’s Royal Books. I believe I ordered it through their website with a credit card on my lunch break. I happened to be at my desk and the telephone rang. It was Kevin Johnson of Royal Books on the line, asking me about what I was collecting and telling me that he thought I’d really like this copy. We continued to exchange pleasantries over the next few years, and Kevin was also glad to answer my questions.  

In 2010, Kevin encouraged me to attend the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar. I couldn’t make it work that year, but I did attend in 2011. It changed my life. Not only did I meet some amazing leaders in the world of rare books, I was encouraged to not use someone’s else list as a purchasing guide (Terry Belanger called that “just shopping”). I quickly realized that there were plenty of great mystery writers who had been overlooked by the Edgars or whose work predated the beginning of the awards in 1946. I began to read the classic reference works on the “history of the mystery” by John Carter, Eric Quayle, Howard Haycraft, and others, and I found that I wanted to not only collect the works of earlier authors but also those works that helped define the genre. My focus shifted to the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.  

The highlight of my collecting life is membership in the Grolier Club, and my curation of this exhibition brought me much pleasure. 

—Jeffrey Johnson 

Language, Decipherment, and Translation - from Then to Now

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Poster for Deirdre E. Lawrence's Exhibition
Drawn primarily from my personal collection of approximately 2,000 books and prints, and growing, this exhibition reflects my collecting interests spanning the ancient world, especially Egypt; the work of Walt Whitman; the history of art, including photography; and books made by contemporary artists. A graduate from Pratt’s Library and Information Science program, I had a long career working as an art librarian at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Museum. Both institutions provided me with excellent learning opportunities as I had intellectual access to encyclopedic collections and curatorial scholars who generously shared their knowledge. Studying art history, teaching at Pratt Institute, and writing about books has opened many doors into topics ranging from antiquity to artists’ books.   

As Principal Librarian at the Brooklyn Museum, I oversaw extensive research collections and curated and co-curated several exhibitions drawn from those collections, including Artists Books (2000) and Egypt through Other Eyes (2003–2006). The Museum’s early history sparked my interest in Walt Whitman, who had served as librarian of the Brooklyn Institute, the predecessor of the Museum. This ongoing interest has resulted in essays and exhibitions, including Walt Whitman’s Words: Inspiring Artists Today, held at the Center for Book Arts in 2019.  

Now I welcome the opportunity to present works that reflect my interests within a unifying theme: how art and language are intertwined throughout history, starting with early attempts to translate the Egyptian hieroglyphs and continuing with contemporary artists. Inspired by the 200th anniversary of the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone in 2022, threaded throughout this exhibition is the notion of art as a universal language that illuminates our understanding of world history. 

A few early works on Egyptian hieroglyphs set the stage, then the exhibition takes a seismic leap in time to books created by contemporary artists who are interested in language, decipherment, and translation. Works focused on a variety of languages—some real and some invented— are included, representing a range of typography and printing processes. Subthemes of the exhibition include erasure and redaction, signs and symbols, storytelling, and other forms of communication. Formats include the traditional codex form, collages, prints and scrolls, and sculpted books. This kaleidoscope of images and ideas hopefully inspires consideration of how books provoke and engage with art, language, and history.  

Thank you to the many people who have contributed their thoughts to the creation of this exhibition, in particular Shira Buchsbaum, Exhibitions Manager, and other key Grolier Club Staff, Consultants and Members. I would like to say a big thank you to two people in particular: Keith DuQuette, an accomplished artist and expert collaborator on the design and production of this exhibition, and my husband, Clem Labine, who has patiently read my words and supported my projects over the years. I am grateful to Clive Phillpot and Tony Zwicker who early on helped me understand the landscape of the page within the book.  

- Deirdre E. Lawrence 

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Composite image created by Keith DuQuette. Images from left to right: Report of the Committee Appointed by the Philomathean Society... of the University of Pennsylvania to Translate the Inscription on the Rosetta Stone; The Flight into Egypt: The Third Magnitude. Image courtesy of Timothy C. Ely; Didier Mutel La Pierre Rosette (The Rosetta Stone). Image courtesy of Didier Mutel.

The Best-Read Army in the World: the Power of the Written Word in World War II

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Exhibition Poster for The Best-Read Army in the World, curated by Molly Manning, exhibited at the Grolier Club

During World War II, one of the most important weapons U.S. troops wielded was the written word. At a time when propaganda and censorship choked free thought, the U.S. military fought against these repressions by disseminating over one billion books, magazines, and newspapers to troops worldwide. “As popular as pin-up girls,” these publications provided an escape from war, information that would diffuse falsehoods, and reminders of home. Reading was so prevalent among the troops that the New York Post declared that the United States had “the best-read army in the world.”

On display are the panoply of publications read by America’s foot soldiers during World War II. Small, lightweight, and ubiquitous, these literary novelties include miniaturized versions of popular magazines and newspapers, propaganda leaflets, and the smallest mass-produced paperbacks in history, the “Armed Services Editions.” With these books tucked in their pockets, American soldiers invaded Europe bearing titles and authors that had been banned and burned by the Nazis. When Congress attempted to ban certain books from the military, troops and the American public vehemently resisted, and the law was swiftly amended. Words were weapons, and the best way to fight repressions was to read.

Molly Guptill Manning, Curator

Presidents and Their Books: What They Read and What They Wrote

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FROM THE COLLECTOR

Some of us are born collectors and others seem to pick it up later in life after careful nurturing through their formative years. I’m the former, and while I hoped to pass this gene along to my sons, they never picked up the mantle. But as I watched my grandchildren Natalie and Spencer Flaxman grow, I knew I had willing participants as I guided them through puzzles and games featuring U.S. presidents. As they matured, that interest evolved, culminating in this exhibition of Presidents and Their Books: What They Read & What They Wrote. Collecting books is always about a connection to the past with an eye to the future, and nowhere has that connection been so clear to me as in assembling these books owned or inscribed by our nation’s leaders. Sharing this experience with my grandchildren amplified and deepened our excitement as we visited presidential homes and other historical sites. The books on display here are a part of our shared history—both as a country and as a family. I’m proud of Natalie and Spencer, who were willing to pick up the gauntlet to join the next generation of collectors.

Susan Jaffe Tane



FROM THE CURATORS

When I was growing up, we would recite the names of presidents around the family dinner table, which sparked my interest in learning about them. In addition, I loved learning about our country’s history during history class. I had known that my grandmother collected books, and I enjoyed going through her library in her New York City apartment and viewing them. I also knew that she had previously completed exhibitions. I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but I was very curious to find out. So, when my grandmother first discussed the idea of this exhibition with my brother and me, I was very enthusiastic. I have found joy in working alongside my grandmother and getting to bond with her on something we both are passionate about. I’m eager to display this collection to my friends and family, and I’m very proud of the hard work my brother and grandmother and I all put into it. Seeing the steps come together reminds me of how quickly this project went by. It feels like just yesterday when my brother and I received our first book in the collection (My Life by Bill Clinton). I hope you enjoy the exhibition!

Natalie Flaxman



Starting when we were young, my Nana would always play president games with my sister and me. We tried to memorize the presidents in order using cards. I’ve always enjoyed learning about history, especially American history. I watched YouTube videos and was engaged at school. But more recently, I became a sports fanatic, and sports was all I watched. Around two years ago, my Nana brought my sister and me back to my old liking and suggested that we put together an exhibition about all the presidents and the books in their libraries. My memories came rushing back, and I was pleased about this opportunity. After many meetings and hard work, we put it all together. I am very grateful for working alongside many supportive people to help me make this the best project possible. I hope to keep the book collecting gene alive from my Nana, and I hope you enjoy this exhibition.

Spencer Flaxman

New Members Collect 2023

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Intro Panel New Members Collect 2023

Founded in 1884, the Grolier Club is America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts.

Named for Jean Grolier (1489/90-1565), the Renaissance collector renowned for sharing his library with friends, the Club’s objective is to promote “the study, collecting, and appreciation of books and works on paper.” Our members are an international network of over eight hundred book and print collectors, antiquarian book dealers, librarians, designers, fine printers, binders, and other bibliophiles.

Anyone is welcome visit the Grolier Club's exhibitions, purchase its publications, attend its lectures and other public events, and apply to use its Library. Formal membership, however, is subject to certain rules and restrictions. The Grolier Club is a private bibliophile society, which means that candidates may not apply for membership, but must be nominated. Nominations are based on a candidate's personal and/or professional commitment to books, as demonstrated through outstanding activity as a collector, antiquarian book dealer, rare book librarian, or some other bookish pursuit.

Every year, the Grolier Club hosts a summer "New Members Collect" exhibition in our second floor gallery. This exhibition is an opportunity for anyone who was elected to membership in the previous year to showcase their personal collections, if they happen to collect.

To Fight for the Poor With My Pen: Zoe Anderson Norris, Queen of Bohemia

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To Fight for the Poor With My Pen

Zoe Anderson Norris, Queen of Bohemia

The writer Zoe Anderson Norris (1860–1914) fell into poverty while documenting the lives of the impoverished. She has fascinated me since 2018, when I first saw an issue of her bimonthly magazine, The East Side (1909–1914), in the American periodicals collection of Grolier Club member Dr. Steven Lomazow. Her goal: “to fight for the poor with my pen.”

From her “literary sanctum” apartment on Manhattan’s East 15th Street, she called for reforms to help immigrants, mainly Italians and Eastern European Jews. She pitied and admired newly minted Americans (like my own Ukrainian grandparents), navigating trash-piled streets and adapting stairwells into pickle stands. While reminiscing about her childhood in rural Kentucky and two bad marriages, she raged against evils that persist: sexual predators terrifying victims into silence, deadbeat fathers, corrupt police harassing peddlers. She wrote every East Side word, drawing readers as prominent as the philosopher Elbert Hubbard, yet barely making ends meet. She gave herself all masthead titles: bootblack, circulation liar, bricklayer, and “the whole shebang.”

She sometimes reported undercover, dressed as a beggar, to see how passersby and philanthropists treated her—the elevator pitch for my Zoe biography in progress is “the Nellie Bly you’ve never heard of.” (I call her Zoe, by the way, since that’s what she called herself. Her relatives tell me it is pronounced to rhyme with foe, not zo-ee.)

Subscribers ($1 per year) could join her intentionally disorganized group, the Ragged Edge Klub. They held weekly restaurant dinners and mastered new dances, like the Airship Quadrille and Banana Peel Slide. Known as the Queen of Bohemia, Zoe used a wine bottle as a scepter to grant aristocratic titles. She transformed the Klub’s writers, artists, performers, reformers, scoundrels, and crackpots into the likes of the Prince of McPike (the Missouri-born cigar dealer Jack H. McPike) or Countess Ella Bosworth of Brooklyn (a respectable leader of women’s clubs).

My Zoe biography is provisionally titled Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death, quoting headlines on her obituaries. The East Side’s last issue described Zoe’s recent dream that she would soon head to “the undiscovered country” and detailed her ideal funeral program. She mailed it out, dined with Ragged Edgers, collapsed, and died of heart failure. After hundreds of newspapers reported on her accurate premonition, she fell into undeserved obscurity.

My 29 East Side issues—with die-cut covers, Art Nouveau typefaces and sketches by William Oberhardt (later renowned for Time magazine covers)—are the only complete run known to survive in private hands. I own dozens of other periodicals featuring her work; inscribed copies of her autobiographical novels—former owners include her relatives and Ragged Edgers; ragtime sheet music composed or performed by Klub members; and dinnerware from Klub hangouts.

Zoe typed tirelessly about “wrongs that should be righted,” amid crumbling tenements and skyscrapers “flashing back the fire of the sun.” She was brave and foolhardy, trying to change the world. Her masthead’s longest job title: “If You Want to See What She Is, Start Something.”

Eve M. Kahn

Animated Advertising: 200 Years of Premiums, Promos, and Pop-ups

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Intro Panel

Animated Advertising

200 Years of Premiums, Promos, and Pop-ups

When I started collecting dimensional paper objects over 35 years ago, my focus was on pop-up and movable books. At book fairs, I would pass up or leave for last booths with postcards and ephemera. After joining the Ephemera Society and attending their conferences and book shows, I learned of the scholarship and variety involved in ephemera. Sadly, I didn’t begin cataloging them until about four years ago.

What has become clear to me is that, paradoxically, the material that was the most fragile and meant to be discarded often demonstrated the most complex mechanicals. Knowing, as I do now, that greater complexity entails the greatest cost, I am astounded at the time, effort, and money poured into many of these objects, mostly advertisements. 

It made perfect sense that movable and three-dimensional ads would be made by those industries that have the biggest advertising budgets, like pharmaceuticals, alcohol, and automobiles. Food and tobacco are right behind. Preparing for this exhibition has given me the opportunity to learn about the history of advertising and the social pressures and advances in technology that shaped the industry.  

This exhibit is about the use of movable paper elements in advertisements. To sell a product, idea, or announce an event, one’s attention must be grabbed and retained. Graphic designers, with the support of paper engineers, design dimensional advertisements to make them interactive, commanding the attention of the end user. 

I’ve tried to highlight social changes and dramatic progressions in printing and manufacturing technology and how they shaped the ads of their times. I’ve sought to include different mechanisms, languages, and points of view even including those objects that have incorporated the nonchalant use of racism, colonialism, and abuse of children. I have come to treasure and be grateful for these ephemeral objects, by definition intended to be discarded, which are decades, if not centuries old, and were kept, valued, and passed down through generations. I wish all visitors to appreciate the foresightedness of collectors. The objects are here for your appreciation only because they were treasured. Every exhibition gives me the chance to “shop and share,” for as Nathaniel C. Fowler said, “What’s the good of unknown good.” 

This exhibition and catalog demonstrate the employment of mechanical and dimensional paper and their unique and varied uses for advertising purposes. These premiums and promotional items are but the tip of the collection. I find them exciting in their creativity, clever in their messages, and staggering in their survival. It pains me to think how this digital age will rob the future. Without these corporeal examples, what material will there be to handle, maintain, and study? 

Ellen G. K. Rubin

Pattern and Flow: A Golden Age of American Decorated Paper, 1960s to 2000s

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Pattern and Flow

A Golden Age of American Decorated Papers, 1960s-2000s

"Pattern and Flow: A Golden Age of American Decorated Paper, 1960s to 2000s" includes the work of over fifty artists who, working independently and together, revived the largely forgotten arts of marbled and paste paper design. This exhibition is a history of their imagination, innovation, and invention. The designs created by these pioneers and their followers are striking and take traditional art forms to new, expressive dimensions. The papers on view represent different techniquesincluding Western-style marbling, Japanese marbling (suminagashi), paste paper, stenciling, and fold-and-dye technique (orizome or itajime). The broad audience for decorated paper, especially from the late 1970s through the 1990s, included bookbinders, interior and graphic designers, and artists. They used the papers to make many things, including books, boxes, home furnishings, wallcovering, textile designs, and designs for everyday objects, such as the “Classic-Foil” marbled Kleenex box, with a marbled wave pattern which was originally commissioned from Faith Harrison in the late 1980s.

"Pattern and Flow" is the first Grolier Club exhibition to explore the art of decorated paper. The objects in the exhibition are from the Paper Legacy Collection, Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Building on an in-depth international collection on the history of paper, the Paper Legacy Collection was initiated in 2017 by Mindell Dubansky, skilled book conservator and historian of the arts of the book, Watson’s Museum Librarian for Preservation, and Grolier Club member.

The Friends of Thomas J. Watson Library are the generous sponsors of the exhibition. Curated by Mindell Dubansky, Museum Librarian for Preservation, Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Building the Book from the Ancient World to the Present Day: Five Decades of Rare Book School & the Book Arts Press

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Intro Panel

Building the Book from the Ancient World to the Present Day

Five Decades of Rare Book School & The Book Arts Press

We have all been taught how to read books. But what can we learn by looking closely at their material forms? This exhibition celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Rare Book School and the Book Arts Press, which teaches leading curators, librarians, conservators, book historians, and collectors how to analyze books as physical objects, along with the materials and equipment used to make them.

Crossing borders and time periods, this show attempts to tell the larger story of the book as it reflects human society and culture over more than two millennia. The shapes of books are as varied as those who create them. We use the term “book” loosely, then, to refer to artifacts that fall within a variety of traditions, as well as to gesture toward more unusual objects that invite themselves to be considered as books—sometimes in deliberately self-conscious and provocative ways.

You will find in these cases artifacts from Rare Book School’s teaching collections, ranging from plant fibers and animal skins to glass negatives and photopolymer plates—from woodblocks and metal printing type to floppy disks and digital devices. The items that we have selected are not always beautiful, and many of them are not particularly “rare.” What is special about this collection is its purpose: to advance our understanding of the physical book and to preserve its history. Digitization alone cannot ensure the survival of this history, as much of what these artifacts have to teach us is carried within their own material construction. By learning to “read” books as objects, we are able to see more deeply not only into how books are made, but also into the very heart of human history.

Barbara Heritage
Associate Director & Curator of Collections

Ruth-Ellen St. Onge
Associate Curator & Special Collections Librarian
Rare Book School at the University of Virginia