Browse Exhibits (48 total)

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. 

 This year, we feel honored and fortunate to exhibit works from our own collections, as we were elected as members of The Grolier Club this previous year. We’re grateful that our work at the Club provides us with the opportunity to meet thoughtful, creative, and passionate collectors and book workers who show us infinite ways of engaging with book history, and in so doing, forge book futures.

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 Scott Whipkey and Deanna Lee for art preparation. The typeface for this exhibition is Grolier by Jerry Kelly.

Running Through Heaven: Visions of Jack Kerouac

March 5 – May 16, 2026

Jack Kerouac is a defining author of postwar America: his life and work had an enormous influence on American culture from the late 1950s onwards. As The New York Times once noted, his enthusiastic embrace of Black, Latino, and gay culture; his enchantment with Zen Buddhism; the influence of drugs on his work; and the ecological bent of much of his writing all presage the social movements of the 1960s. These aspects are all fully present in his public and private writings more than a decade earlier. Kerouac’s writing offers more than a mere chronicle of youthful escapade; it is a map of spiritual and personal growth, a detailed rendering of his search for meaning in postwar America. Dedicating himself to his art when he was quite young, Kerouac sought meaning and purpose in his life through his engagement with both Western and Eastern thought. 

- Jacob Loewentheil, Curator

Paper Jane: 250 Years of Austen

From the Collections of Janine Barchas, Sandra Clark, and Mary Crawford

December 4, 2025 to February 14, 2026

Today, as we mark the 250th anniversary of her birth, Jane Austen (1775–1817) is arguably the best-known author in the English language after Shakespeare. That was not always the case. When she died at the early age of forty-one, Austen remained relatively unknown, having published only four novels anonymously (“by a Lady”). 

This exhibition measures the novelist’s growing fame at fifty-year intervals: ending in 1825, 1875, 1925, 1975, and 2025. In the bibliographical tradition of The Grolier Club, we have constructed a timeline for Jane Austen using books and paper collectables. We hope the result surprises our visitors as much as it did us: rare first editions and manuscripts mix irreverently with popular reprintings, giveaways, movie posters, illustrations, theater playbills, and all manner of paper ephemera. This kaleidoscopic mix reflects Jane Austen’s heady reputation as a revered canonical author whose books simultaneously appeal as accessible, engaging fiction—studied in schools while also enjoyed as “chick lit.” 

In print for more than two centuries, Austen’s works have witnessed every innovation in book production during that time. Thus, an exhibition about one author’s growing fame also tells a broader story about changes in publishing and reading. 

Our exhibition offers two strong through lines: book production and Austen family involvement. On the one hand, ever-lowering prices for books made Jane Austen a household name, increasing readership as the cost of her stories decreased. On the other hand, generations of Austen family descendants offered new material: biographies, letters, juvenilia, even alternative endings or fan fictions of their own. Interestingly, the stodgy family lore about “Dear Aunt Jane” was often at odds with the public’s perception of the spirited and witty “Miss Austen” evidenced in these new materials. 

When Jane Austen died quietly in 1817, she had not seen her literary star shine much beyond a small circle of elite readers. In 1825, Austen’s early reputation still rested almost exclusively on the modest print runs of her earliest editions—with four novels published during her lifetime and an additional two printed the year after her death. By 1875, Austen’s novels had become fodder for cheap, stereotyped reprint series that made books available to the masses on both sides of the Atlantic. These reprintings expanded her audience to include ordinary readers and prompted a nephew to pen a memoir. By 1925, Austen’s novels were deemed worthy of serious scholarly treatments as well as lavishly illustrated editions. “Miss Austen” was now read by schoolchildren and war veterans alike. By 1975, Austen’s novels had been sent to the front of yet another world war; were targeted to female consumers in popular “pinked” paperbacks; and had been translated for readers around the globe. Pride and Prejudice had also been successfully adapted for both stage and screen. In 2025, Austen remains Hollywood’s darling, while supporting entire Janeite subgenres of creative adaptations, spoofs, and scholarly criticism. 

All three curators are committed Janeites. Yet we hope the temporal scale of our exhibition appeals to visitors beyond Austen fans. While these books and paper objects concern a single and singular author, they also reflect a shared print culture. 

Janine Barchas, Mary Crawford, and Sandra Clark 

Richard Aldington was a British poet, a literary critic, a translator, a novelist, a biographer, and a formidable letter-writer. He was sponsored by Ezra Pound as an Imagist poet before World War I, and he married H.D., the American poet and novelist, in 1913. Aldington is commemorated in Westminster Abbey as one of the WWI War Poets. 

Following demobilization, he joined the staff of The Times Literary Supplement as a reviewer of French books, and became a friend of D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot. In 1928, he moved to Paris, where he wrote a bitter war novel, Death of A Hero. Between 1928 and 1939, Aldington published six more novels including the romantic All Men Are Enemies and the feminist Women Must Work. He continued to write poetry, including A Dream in the Luxembourg, and to make translations, including The Decameron.  

In 1939, Aldington moved to the United States and completed an anthology, The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World. He stayed in New York City, Connecticut, and Florida before moving to Hollywood, where he worked as a screenwriter and completed a biography of the Duke of Wellington. 

After World War II, Aldington returned to France and focused on anthologies and biography. His Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry brought him into conflict with the British establishment, and his works were substantially allowed to go out of print. As a result, Aldington was short of money but was supported by friends such as Bryher, Lawrence Durrell, and the Australian poet Alastair Kershaw. He died in France in 1962 following a triumphant visit to Russia, where his novels were very popular. 

Aldington could be a difficult man, and some of his later output has been criticized as bitter. Although now largely overlooked, the reputation of Aldington has been tended by The New Canterbury Literary Society, and by a steady issuance of scholarly articles and publications, culminating in the recent exceptional two-volume biography by Vivien Whelpton.  

In 1973, I bought a copy of Portrait of a Genius, But…, Aldington’s biography of his friend, D.H. Lawrence, the ‘other‘ Lawrence. I read this sitting outside a pub in Hampshire and thought that some of Aldington’s comments were hilarious. I was hooked. I started to collect Aldington, and I have never stopped. In 2008, I bought the substantial collection of a fellow collector who was my leading competitor, and I believe that I now have the largest collection of Aldington in private hands. 

There are so many interesting aspects to Aldington: the quality of his writing, the range of his work, the breadth and depth of his scholarship, the interest of his voluminous correspondence, the extent and evolution of his friendships, and his complicated personal life.   

I hope that you enjoy learning about this fascinating man. 

- Simon Hewett, Curator

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.