THE GROLIER CLUB OF NEW YORK was one of the first organizations in America to treat books and prints as objects worthy of display, on par with painting and sculpture. In its 139-year history the Club has organized more than five hundred such exhibitions on topics ranging from Blake to Kipling, from chess to murder mysteries, from Japanese prints (the poster for an 1896 Grolier Japanese print exhibition is shown here) to Art Nouveau posters. There are three shows a year in the ground floor gallery, all open to the public free of charge.
In addition, the Club mounts each year four smaller-scale exhibitions in our second floor gallery featuring the collections of Grolier Club members.
Below is a short list of the exhibitions with online surrogates, all of which can be browsed on our Exhibitions page.
Public Exhibitions
- Hardly Harmless Drudgery: Landmarks in English Lexicography
- Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of the Grolier Club, 1470s-2020
- The Best-Read Army in the World: The Power of the Written Word in World War II
- A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus, 1841-1941
- Pattern and Flow: A Golden Age of American Decorated Paper, 1960s-2000s
- Building the Book from the Ancient World to the Present Day: Five Decades of Rare Book School & the Book Arts Press
- Travelers, Tracks and Tycoons: The Railroad in American Legend and Life
- Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects
- Treasures from the Hispanic Society Library
- 100 Books Famous in Typography
- Magazines and the American Experience
- Further Impressions: Major Grolier Club Library Acquisitions, 2005-2020
- Open Set: Design Binding Today
- Five Hundred Years of Women's Work: The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection
- Poet of the Body: New York's Walt Whitman
- French Book Arts: Manuscripts, Books, Bindings, Prints & Documents 12th-21st Century
- Grolier Club Collects II
- Aldus Manutius: A Legacy More Lasting than Bronze
- Lasting Impressions: The Grolier Club Library
- Strangers in a Strange Land
Member Exhibitions
- Language, Decipherment, Translation - from Then to Now
- Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction
- Presidents and Their Books: What They Read and What They Wrote
- New Members Collect 2023
- To Fight for the Poor With My Pen: Zoe Anderson Norris, Queen of Bohemia
- Animated Advertising: 200 Years of Premiums, Promos, and Pop-Ups
- Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young
- New Members Collect 2022
- Photographs at the Edge: Vittorio Sella and Wilfred Thesiger
- The Daniel Press: Pioneer of the English Private Press Movement
- "The Great George": Cruikshank & London's Graphic Humorists
- New Members Collect 2021
- Taming the Tongue: In the Heyday of English Grammar
- The History of Plastic Surgery: Much More Than Skin Deep
- Highlights from the Stanley D. Scott Gift
- New Members Collect 2020
- A Conversation Larger than the Universe: Science Fiction and the Literature of the Fantastic