Browse Exhibits (4 total)
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.
H. George Fletcher
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.