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By Eve M. Kahn, independent scholar and Grolier Club Council member (evekahn.com) From the 1910s to the 1930s, a cryptic phrase was embossed in tiny type at the lower left edge on leather covers of countless copies of Webster’s New International Dictionary: “Patented Dec. 14, 1909.” (An example from 1919 appears in the Grolier Club’s … Continue reading Rediscovering Averill Cole, bookbinder and dictionary cover patenter
Landmarks in English LexicographyCurated by Bryan A. Garner and Jack Lynch May 2 - July 27, 2024 Samuel Johnson, creator of the first great English dictionary, wickedly mocked his own trade when he defined lexicographer as “A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of … Continue reading Now Open in our Ground Floor Gallery: Hardly Harmless Drudgery
By Scott Ellwood, Bruce & Mary Crawford Curator At the Grolier Club Library, catalogues form the core of our research collections. While the majority of these are catalogues of antiquarian books (including private libraries, bibliographies, or lists of books to be sold) we also collect type specimens and catalogues of printing equipment. One particular catalogue … Continue reading From Catalogue to Glossary, A Case of Arabic Printing
by Kevin McKinney, Library Assistant Bookplate of Tyndall Savage, designed by Pauline Stone While working on an inventory of the Grolier Club bookplate collection, I became attached to a file folder filled with children’s bookplates dating from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. The bookplate above, designed by Pauline Stone … Continue reading Children’s Bookplates in the Grolier Club Bookplate Collection
From the Collection of Deirdre E. Lawrence February 29 - May 11 A new exhibition of contemporary art books at the Grolier Club celebrates thousands of years of communication through real and imagined languages. On view from February 29 through May 11, 2024 in the Club’s second floor gallery, Language, Decipherment, and Translation – from … Continue reading Now Open in Our Second Floor Gallery: Language, Decipherment, Translation – from Then to Now
The following post comes from the Grolier Club Library's current exhibit, “A Tribute to Eric Holzenberg,” which opened on January 24, 2024, curated by Library staff in honor of his retirement after 30 years at the Grolier Club. Eric Holzenberg, Rare Book Cataloger, Loyola University of Chicago, Cudahy Library, 1992 IN HONOR of Eric Holzenberg’s … Continue reading A Tribute to Eric Holzenberg: The Librarian, Scholar & Collector, Clubhouse Curator, and Grolierite
Bookbindings from the Collections of the Grolier Club, 1470s-2020 January 17 – April 13, 2024 Judging a Book by Its Cover highlights selections from seven centuries of the Grolier Club’s collection of bindings, largely donated and built by the Club’s members over the course of its 140-year history. The exhibition explores the history of decorated … Continue reading Now Open in Our Ground Floor Gallery: Judging a Book by Its Cover
By Jamie Cumby, Librarian This summer, Grolier member Caroline Schimmel made a generous and fascinating gift to the Library: a portfolio of commercial book cover designs by an almost completely unknown woman artist named Antoinette Louise Hayes.1 Hayes was an art school graduate who lived independently as a working artist in Boston from 1898 to … Continue reading Reconstructing the Life and Work of Antoinette Louise Hayes, book cover designer
From the Collection of Jeffrey JohnsonNovember 30, 2023 - February 10, 2024 Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction features selections from Grolier Club member Jeffrey Johnson’s more than 400-piece collection of detective novels from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The exhibition highlights more than 90 early examples of the sources, heavily fictionalized memoirs, and … Continue reading Now Open in our Second Floor Gallery: Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction
By Kevin McKinney, Library Assistant and Kate Rowland, Exhibitions Assistant The Grolier Club Library has rotating exhibits of books from our collections in four small cases in the reading room. The following text and examples come from the current exhibit, “Enemies of Books” installed on September 28, 2023. The Library is always open to Grolier … Continue reading Enemies of Books
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