Browse Exhibits (48 total)

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 

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

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 September 12 – November 9, 2024 The Grolier Club: Second Floor Gallery

Melville’s Billy Budd at 100 November 17 – December 20, 2024 Oberlin College & Conservatory Libraries

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. 

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