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o o o o Collections
Overview o o o |
Collections OverviewA detailed survey of the collections of the
Grolier Club Library can be found in
Lasting
Impressions: The Grolier Club
Library, published to accompany the
exhibition
held at the Club May 11-July 31, 2004. Bibliography Collections |
The founders of the Grolier Club originally intended the Library to be a working reference collection of standard bibliographical works and books relating to the art of printing. It is still so used, and although the scope of the Library has grown in succeeding decades, author, title, and subject bibliographies retain a central place. In addition to current works, the collection includes many rare and early examples, such as Johannes Trithemius' 1494 Liber de scriptoribus ecclesiasticis, the first bibliography to be compiled as a work of reference. The mission of the Grolier Club is the "literary study and promotion of the arts pertaining to the production of books," and the Library is rich in works documenting the history of printing, typography, and graphic design. Researchers and practitioners will find much of interest here, from important historical landmarks such as Geoffroy Tory's Champfleury, to 19th-century type specimen books, from Joseph Moxon's 1677 Mechanick Exercises, to catalogues of the latest digitized typefaces. Since 1884 the Club has played a part in the education of typographers, designers, and librarians, and to that end has built a valuable teaching collection illustrating book-making through the centuries. The collection includes a small but choice group of illuminated manuscripts, as well as representative examples of incunabula, and later works by acknowledged masters of printing and typography--Aldus, Jenson, Plantin, Baskerville, Bodoni, and a host of others. The modern fine press movement is particularly well represented, and, along with supporting secondary literature, the researcher will find many examples illustrating the work of typographers and designers, from William Morris to Joseph Blumenthal. The Club's rich collection of reference works on the art and craft of book-binding is complemented by a choice array of examples. A fitting centerpiece is the Library's important 'Grolier binding'--one of the distinctive and beautiful 16th-century gilt bindings commissioned by the Club's namesake, Jean Grolier. Early in its history the Club maintained its own firm of binders imported from France, and there are some delightful examples in the collection of the work of the 'Club Bindery'. Aside from these highlights, the collection includes a large and representative sampling of bindings ancient and modern--focusing on the work of notable craftsmen from Roger Payne to Michael Wilcox--in all styles, and in every conceivable material, from cloth to silver. Prints, Drawings, & Photographs The very first Grolier exhibition, mounted in 1884, was a survey of etchings from Dürer to Whistler, and the Club maintains to this day a lively interest in the graphic arts. The Society of Iconophiles, organized in 1894 by Grolier Club member William Loring Andrews for the purpose of producing fine prints of New York subjects, was an important focus of Club activity until the demise of the Society in 1939, and the Club retains the organization's very complete and interesting archive. The Library's own print collection, appropriately enough, is centered on images of bookish subjects and portraits of men and women notable in the book arts, as well as bookplates and other related bibliophile ephemera, each category supported by its own reference collection. Bookseller & Book Auction Catalogues The Grolier Club is pre-eminent among libraries documenting the buying, selling and collecting of books. The research core of the Library is a collection of nearly fifty thousand bookseller and book auction catalogues, perhaps the largest (and certainly the most accessible) archive in America of this notoriously rare and ephemeral material, and much consulted by book historians. The Library's collection of private library catalogues is perhaps unrivalled in the United States. The collection spans nearly three centuries, and encompasses unique manuscript inventories (such as that of Madame de Pompadour's library), as well as printed lists of libraries great and obscure. Some of the most important examples of this genre in the Library are recent acquisitions: the 250-volume manuscript slip-catalogue of Lord Spencer's great library (complete with mahogany travelling case), as well as a full set of catalogues printed by Sir Thomas Phillipps to document his fabled Bibliotheca Phillippica. The Library currently subscribes to about 150 journals in the fields of bibliography, librarianship, book collecting, printing and the book arts, and also maintains runs of important early periodicals as part of its research collections. The Library's manuscript and archival collections cover a period of over four hundred years, and contain a great deal of unique and valuable research material supporting the Club's focus on printing, bookselling, and book collecting. The Library's autograph collections include letters documenting the bookish activities of Jean Grolier, Thomas Wotton (the "English Grolier"), Jacques de Thou, Cardinal Mazarin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, and Guglielmo Libri. The cornerstone of the Club's archival holdings on book collecting is the Phillipps Collection, some three thousand books, manuscripts, and letters pertaining to Sir Thomas Phillipps, the great nineteenth-century English bibliomaniac. |
