Browse Exhibits (40 total)
New Members Collect 2025
New Members Collect 2025
May 29 – July 26, 2025
Second Floor Gallery
Our final exhibition each season comprises contributions from the collections of our members admitted in the previous year. While the prompt of New Members Collect remains consistent for each cycle—“select objects from one’s collection representative of one’s interests (which, we admit, is no simple task)”—we are energized and fascinated by the wide variety of materials that arrive at the Exhibitions Department each Spring.
We hope you enjoy this year’s selection of works!
Oscar Salguero, Assistant Director of Exhibitions
Shira Belén Buchsbaum, Susan Jaffe Tane Director of Exhibitions
Special thanks to Nicole Neenan for photography; Misha Beletsky for graphic design; and Lee Berman & Scott Whipkey for art preparation. The typeface for this exhibition is Grolier by Jerry Kelly.
After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960-2025
After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025
April 23 – July 26, 2025
Ground Floor Gallery
By the 1960s, visual poetry was widely acknowledged as the first truly international poetry movement, occurring on several continents. The simultaneous “mimeograph revolution”—an emerging name for the proliferation of small, poet- and artist-operated presses and little magazines that emerged in the postwar era—meant that an extraordinary variety of experimental work appeared in ephemeral outlets. In particular, little magazines (in which “little” refers to their grassroots orientation and small print runs) reflected an array of geographic influence and communities and circulated the development of experimental poetry in real time.
After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025 is a thematic journey through the recent history of visual poetry and draws from the collection of Steve Clay at Granary Books, an imprint that has published verbal/visual works for the past forty years. After Words features little magazine and small press works that use cut-up, collage, sound poetry scores, performance scripts, practices of “writing through,” erasure, asemic writing, glyph systems, calligraphy, experimental typography, non-Western alphabets, assemblages, and beyond, to trace the varieties of forms that an experimental poetics might take.
The radical and experimental approaches of the poets, artists, magazines, and presses in this exhibition are increasingly relevant to contemporary media. Now more than ever, we live in text-based environments that are increasingly image-heavy—social media, email, the Internet. We continue to share the anxieties that haunted the first generations of concrete and visual poets—war, nationalism, ecological destruction. In turning our ears and eyes towards these poets, may the evidence of their efforts inspire us to create works and communities that sustain us.
*
Curated by Steve Clay and M.C. Kinniburgh, in collaboration with Conley Lowrance. Graphic design and publication management for the exhibition catalog by M.C. Kinniburgh at Granary Books. Our sincere appreciation to the Susan Jaffe Tane Director of Exhibitions Shira Buchsbaum, Assistant Director of Exhibitions Oscar Salguero, Executive Director Declan Kiely, and Kate McKenzie and Lee Berman. We thank the Chair of the Publications Committee Marie Oedel, Publications Manager Ann Donahue, and the Chair of the Public Exhibitions Committee, Michael T. Ryan. We are especially grateful to the poets, artists, editors, and publishers whose work is featured in this exhibition, and whose important ideas shaped the trajectory of this project.
Poster design by M.C. Kinniburgh. Image is Journeyman no. 12, by Robert Lax and Emil Antonucci. Courtesy of The Robert Lax Literary Trust and the Estate of Catherine Antonucci.
Images are for educational use only; if you are the creator and do not wish to have your item featured in this online exhibition, please contact us: info [at] grolierclub [dot] org.
Wish You Were Here: Wish You Were Here: Guidebooks, Viewbooks, Photobooks and Maps of New York City, 1807-1940
Wish You Were Here: Guidebooks, Viewbooks, Photobooks, and Maps of New York City, 1807-1940
March 6 – May 10, 2025
Second Floor Gallery
New York City has always intrigued me. Born in Brooklyn, and growing up in the suburbs, with a father who worked at Madison Avenue and 53rd Street, I became familiar with Midtown Manhattan, working there several summers. The era of postwar New York was drawing to a close. The elevated railroads came down in Manhattan between 1938 and 1955; Pennsylvania Station was lost in the 1960s, and the old seaport area of small commercial buildings on the outer parts of the Financial District, particularly on the east side, was destined to largely disappear.
On the day before Christmas, 1969, I purchased a copy of King’s Photographic Views of New York/A Souvenir Companion to King’s Handbook of New York City (1895). It had page after page of photos of lower Manhattan commercial buildings (I later discovered that most such photos do not appear in the regular tourist viewbooks). I was fascinated. It started my New York City collecting, documenting the physical growth and development of the City in the 19th and 20th centuries. Guidebooks, viewbooks, photobooks, maps, real estate atlases, directories, building brochures and prospectuses, municipal reports, and a wide variety of ephemera were all items I sought.
The exhibition provides a look at the guidebooks, viewbooks, and some maps that visitors and residents would use to learn about, navigate, and remember the City. There are also some unusual photobooks and specialty volumes, such as Zeisloft’s The New Metropolis, a large commemorative volume celebrating the Consolidation of New York City in 1898, and two street panoramas, Both Sides of Broadway and Fifth Avenue New York from Start to Finish, that add to the story of how New York was depicted. Also in this category is the Guild and Perkins book of 1864, Central Park, a remarkable photographic record of the Park in its earliest days.
The Grolier Club is a most suitable place for exhibitions of New York books, prints, and documents. A number of the early members of the Club were interested in New York City history, foremost of which was William Loring Andrews who published some beautifully printed small volumes on certain aspects of New York City history. The Society of Iconophiles, heavily populated by Grolier members, produced multiple series of small edition historical New York City prints, which are another indication of the interest in New York City history in the early years of the Grolier Club.
Mark D. Tomasko, Curator
A First-Class Fool: Mark Twain and Humor
A First-Class Fool: Mark Twain and Humor
January – April 2025
Ground Floor Gallery
A First-Class Fool: Mark Twain and Humor examines Samuel Clemens as a humorist and how he crafted the great “Mark Twain” persona, how he cultivated that persona to widen his audience, and how Twain has influenced humorists and continues to influence them today.
The exhibition’s title is drawn from Clemens’s off-the-cuff speech at an 1899 dinner held in his honor at the Savage Club in London. The toastmaster, Sir John MacAlister, had facetiously insulted Clemens, stating: “Mr. Clemens had tried to be funny but had failed, and his true role in life was statistics . . . and it would be the easiest task he ever undertook if he would try to count all the real jokes he had ever made.” Clemens opened his joking response by declaring: “Perhaps I am not a humorist, but I am a first-class fool–a simpleton; for up to this moment I have believed Chairman MacAlister to be a decent person whom I could allow to mix up with my friends and relatives.”
In context, Twain is speaking specifically to MacAlister’s jibe. But his self-identification as a “first-class fool” captures his dual literary role as a simple, folksy author and speaker on the one hand, and an intelligent, cultured, and nuanced literary craftsman on the other. Twain worked carefully to construct his public persona, giving his public voice the appearance of something naturalistic and unrehearsed. Mark Twain was the performance of Samuel L. Clemens’s lifetime.
Drawn from the private collection of Susan Jaffe Tane and featuring highlights from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at The New York Public Library, A First-Class Fool presents first and rare editions of Twain’s published works, including presentation copies, first periodical appearances, and uncommon variants; books from Twain’s library and other personal effects; Twain’s letters to his friends, publishers, and family; photographs; artwork; and ephemera. Many of these items are displayed for the first time in this exhibition.
Curated by Susan Jaffe Tane, Gabriel Mckee, and Julie Carlsen
Poster design by Miko McGinty
Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works
Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books
December 5, 2024 – February 15, 2025
Second Floor Gallery
Imaginary books are necessarily the rarest of rare books, since of course no such objects are to be found in our sublunary world. These works, existing nowhere but in other books, can never, never be found anywhere but Never-Never Land.
And yet...
And yet this exhibition represents a substantial library of such books. It has been described as a collection of imaginary books and as a post-structuralist conceptual art installation. It consists entirely of simulacra, of parodies, of:
- Lost Books (with no surviving example),
- Unfinished Books (intended but left unfinished), and
- Fictive Books (imaginary books existing only in story or drama).
Of these, over one hundred have been selected to form this exhibition. It will present to the public, in many cases for the first time, some of the greatest non-existent works in all of literature.
An encounter with an imaginary book brings us to a threshold, a liminal moment, paused at the edge of the rabbit hole, stuck at the door of the wardrobe, confronted with an object that we know does not exist. It necessarily leaves us suspended there, for being magical, the book is not to be touched. It is held in existence in the room only by a carefully balanced ontological tension, and for technical thaumaturgical reasons, it cannot be opened. It is here only to amuse: to prompt a gasp, a knowing chuckle, or the briefest thought of “O, how I wish!”
Collectors have often asked where the books have come from. I found them only by following the trails blazed by the great collectors of the imaginary, explorers like Max Beerbohm and James Branch Cabell, seeking out finds in the bookshops and attics “... of Avalon and Phæacia and sea-coast Bohemia, from the contiguous forests of Arden and Brocéliande, and from the west, of course, from the Hesperides.”
Reid Byers, Curator
Abraham Lincoln: His Life in Print
Abraham Lincoln: His Life in Print
September 25 – December 28, 2024
Ground Floor Gallery
In many ways, books made Abraham Lincoln. He became a lawyer through self-disciplined study, won the White House through the concurrent rise of American popular publishing, and remains one of the most written about figures over the 160 years since his death. Abraham Lincoln: His Life in Print uses original printings of books and ephemera to create a sweeping, conceptual portrait of the man. The exhibition features important editions of Lincoln’s greatest accomplishments, including the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, the Cooper Union Speech, his debates with Stephen A. Douglass, and many others. More than 150 objects describe the life of Lincoln as he was born in the American West, captivated by literature, shaped by the portentous 1850s, tested by the American Civil War, responsible for the end of slavery, and murdered and mourned at the age of 56. Featuring materials from the David M. Rubenstein Americana Collection, the exhibition is curated by Mazy Boroujerdi, special advisor to the collection, and is accompanied by a catalogue published by the Grolier Club.
Melville's Billy Budd at 100
Melville’s Billy Budd at 100
September 12 – November 9, 2024
Second Floor Gallery
Melville, at his death in New York City in 1891, left on his desk various poetry and prose manuscripts and other material, including the manuscript leaves—“extensively revised, difficult to decipher, and sometimes internally inconsistent”—of what we now know as Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). It is the tale of a young “Handsome Sailor,” impressed into the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth century, falsely accused of mutiny, and hanged after an onboard drumhead trial, conducted by Captain Vere, for striking and killing his accuser, Master-at-Arms John Claggart. Through the story and its concluding poem, “Billy in the Darbies,” we join the author and his (sometimes omniscient and often seemingly detached) narrator, many decades after the events of the novella, in the “inside” search for what Robert Penn Warren refers to as the “truth hidden in Time.” Each reader, Melville asserts in the text, “must determine ... by such light as the narrative may afford … the inner life of one particular ship and the career of an individual sailor, ... despite the obscuring smoke.”
After Melville’s death, his wife Elizabeth Shaw Melville, who often had assisted in proofing and fair copying his writings, carefully preserved his unfinished manuscripts until her death in 1906, leaving them in the care of her granddaughter, Eleanor Melville Metcalf. At a Columbia University faculty gathering in 1919, Carl Van Doren asked his younger colleague Raymond Weaver to write an essay for The Nation commemorating Melville, and Weaver immediately recognized the need for a biography. When Weaver visited Melville Metcalf seeking family information, she granted him access to Melville’s papers. Among the trove of manuscripts and notes were the manuscript leaves of the unfinished Billy Budd.
There are no known external comments by Melville on his composition, its process, or his publication intentions, if any, for Billy Budd. In 1889, however, during the stages of work on the manuscript and various poems, he wrote to an admirer that what little “vigor” he had left, “I husband for certain matters as yet incomplete and which indeed may never be completed.” Additionally, an appended manuscript leaf may be taken as a coda: “Here ends a story not unwarranted by what happens in this [one undeciphered word] world of ours—Innocence and infamy, spiritual depravity and fair repute.”
~
Herman Melville tells us “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”* This maxim describes my book collecting, ranging from targeted prizes to opportunistically welcome surprises. In recent decades, the works of Melville and Robert Penn Warren have been my primary focus, with emphasis on their poetry. An early Warren poem sequence was my Grolier Club “New Members Collect” presentation in 2017. I now offer a personal bibliographic journey with Billy Budd, begun in the 1960s and expected to extend uncompleted well beyond 2024. The tragic novella and its concluding poem, “Billy in the Darbies,” provide the reader no consolation of a single explanation, demanding that our individual searches continue.
My two-fold impulses prompting this centennial exhibition—and its companion catalogue, broadside with the art of Barry Moser, and symposium—are, firstly, to present the various editions and other materials in a manner that reflects the depth and breadth of the approaches to the novella and their cross-fertilization and, secondly, to encourage unmediated close readings of Herman Melville’s unfinished masterpiece.
W.P.J., August 2024
*Moby-Dick. Chapter 82, “The Honour and Glory of Whaling”
"Billy in the Darbies," graphite drawing by Barry Moser.
Melville’s Billy Budd at 100 |
Melville’s Billy Budd at 100 |
New Members Collect 2024
Our final exhibition each season comprises contributions from the collections of our members admitted to The Grolier Club in the previous year. While the prompt of “New Members Collect” remains consistent for each cycle—select objects from one’s collection representative of one’s interests (which, we admit, this is no simple task)—we are energized and fascinated by the wide variety of materials that arrive at the Exhibition Department’s door each Spring, and even more so by the varied backgrounds, experiences, and imaginations that motivate our members in their bookish pursuits.
Oscar Salguero, Exhibitions Assistant
Shira Belén Buchsbaum, Exhibitions Manager
Hardly Harmless Drudgery: Landmarks in English Lexicography
Dictionaries are repositories of erudition, monuments to linguistic authority, and cultural battlefields. They’ve been announced with messianic fervor and decried as evidence of cultural collapse. They are works of almost superhuman endurance. As commodities in a fiercely competitive market, they’ve kept publishers afloat for generations. They’ve also sometimes sunk publishers. Many are beautiful objects, products of genuine innovation in typography and book design.
This exhibition tells the story of English dictionaries and some of the geniuses, sciolists, plagiarists, and obsessives who’ve created them, from the late Middle Ages to the present—and beyond.
Judging a Book by Its Cover: Bookbindings from the Collections of The Grolier Club, 1470s-2020
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.