Digitized Collections
The Grolier Club Library began digitizing selected portions of its collection in 2014 with the generous support of the Pine Tree Foundation. The inaugural project was the digitization of its own journal, the Grolier Club Gazette (preceded by the Transactions), which made over 125 years of Grolier Club history electronically accessible for the first time. Subsequent projects highlighted material from Grolier Club Library special collections and were funded through the generous support of METRO (Metropolitan New York Library Council). The Library will pursue additional digitization projects as resources and funding allow.
All projects to date are hosted in METRO's freely available online digital repository, DCMNY (Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York) and may be accessed by clicking the links below. We hope you will enjoy exploring the Library's growing collections of digitized material.
Comments and questions may be addressed to Grolier Club Librarian, Jamie Cumby, [email protected].
The Grolier Club Transactions, published in four parts between 1885 and 1921, served as the formal record of Grolier Club events and activities in the first decades of its founding. After four erratically-spaced issues, the Club launched a more regular series, the Gazette of the Grolier Club, with a mandate to publish notices of exhibitions, publications, meetings, and Grolier Club Library acquisitions; statements about scarce or unknown editions, or states of prints belonging to collectors; short bibliographies on various subjects; accounts of printers, publishers, engravers, illustrators and other book-makers; and poems, or other literary pieces on bibliophile subjects. The first series of the Gazette ran between May 1921 and May 1949. After a hiatus of seventeen years the Gazette resumed publication in 1966 with a New Series, which is still issued on an annual basis.
The Transactions and Gazette of The Grolier Club (though no. 63, 2012) were digitized by Backstage Library Works in 2014 with the generous support of The Pine Tree Foundation. The collection is hosted on the New York Heritage Digital Collections website, where it is keyword searchable, and on DCMNY (Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York), hosted by METRO (Metropolitan New York Library Council), without keyword search functionality.
The French Book Arts Trade Card Collection is a group of 57 business cards of French booksellers, print sellers, stationers, and other professionals involved with the book and printing arts, dating from the late 19th to early 20th century. It includes the trade cards of Camille Bloch, Eugène Delâtre, André Desmoulins, Charles Hessele, Charles Gautier, Maurice Le Garrec, Edmund Sagot, and Octave Uzanne, among others. The majority of the cards were donated to the Grolier Club Library by Edward G. Kennedy in 1913.
The French Book Arts Trade card collection was digitized in 2015 by METRO as part of the Culture In Transit project, funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It is hosted on METRO's freely available online repository DCMNY (Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York).
For more information about the project, please see Caroline Catchpole's post on the Culture in Transit blog, "Delving into the Nineteenth Century French Book and Print Trade: Institutional Scanning at The Grolier Club."
The Maria Gerard Messenger Women’s Bookplate Collection is a group of approximately 2000 women's bookplates assembled by Maria Gerard Messenger (1849-1937) of Great Neck, Long Island. The collection represents women book owners from the sixteenth century to the 1930s and includes women from North America, England, France, Germany, the Low Countries and Spain, among other locations.
It includes both well-known collectors and those with little or no documentation. The collection was donated to the Grolier Club by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in March 2016.
The Messenger collection was digitized with the support of a 2016-2017 Digitization Funding Award from METRO (Metropolitan New York Library Council). It is hosted on METRO's freely available online repository DCMNY (Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York).
In 2019 the Grolier Club received a Digitization Funding Award from METRO (Metropolitan New York
Library Council) in the amount of $2290 to digitize its copy of William
Stannard's The Art Exemplar (London
1859?). The Art Exemplar is a rare and
important mid-nineteenth-century encyclopedia of illustration processes,
produced by artist and lithographer, William Stannard. In addition to
describing traditional pictorial processes, such as etching and wood engraving,
The Art Exemplar covers, in depth, a
number of techniques that were new and experimental at the time. Some of these
processes, such as Anaglyptography—a mechanical process of converting a
three-dimensional design to an engraved plate—were in use for only a short period
and are not well-documented elsewhere.
Nearly all of the processes in The Art Exemplar are
illustrated with an original print from Stannard’s own collection. Due to the
finite number of original prints that Stannard could contribute to the
publication, the edition was reportedly limited to ten copies, including four
large paper copies and six regular copies. Nine of the ten copies—including all
four large paper copies—are held by institutions, all of which are located in the U.S. east
coast or London, and the tenth copy is in private hands. The Grolier Club
copy, also from a private collection, is apparently outside the edition of ten,
increasing the number of known copies to eleven. It constituted a major
purchase by the Library in 2016.
The
digitized Art Exemplar is freely available on METRO’s online repository, here, on DCMNY (Digital Culture of Metropolitan
New York),
where it joins the Grolier Club’s other digitized collections. The project was completed in Fall 2020. Thanks to METRO’s support, this
rare and relatively inaccessible work will be made available to scholars and
enthusiasts all over the world.
Grolier Club Publications
Since the founding of The
Grolier Club in 1884, the production of fine books has been a cornerstone of
its activity. From its first
publication, A Decree of Star Chamber
Concerning Printing (1884), to the present day, the Club has produced hundreds of exhibition catalogues, essays, and journal issues on bookish topics of all kinds. Many of these titles, like the Grolier Club "Hundred" series, have become iconic works in the field, praised for their scholarship as well as the beauty of their production. Digitized copies of historic Grolier Club publications may now be found on online digital libraries such as HathiTrust and the Internet Archive. The University of Pennsylvania also maintains a webpage, The Online Books Page, devoted exclusively to digitized books and exhibition handlists published
by the Grolier Club. We have included links to some of these below.
1884-present: The Grolier Club Yearbook, issued annually. (Some volumes between 1900 and 1923 digitized on HathiTrust).
1884: A Decree of Star Chamber Concerning Printing, made July 11, 1637. Reprinted by the Grolier Club, from the first edition by Robert Barker, 1637. (Digitized on Internet Archive).
1889: The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury. Edited from the best
manuscripts and translated into English, with an introduction and notes by
Andrew Fleming West. (Digitized on HathiTrust, vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3).
1890: Catalogue of an exhibition of illustrated bill-posters, at the rooms of
the Grolier Club ... (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1892: Catalogue
of An Exhibition of Illuminated and Painted Manuscripts. Together With a Few
Early Printed Books with Illuminations, Also Some Examples of Persian
Manuscripts. With Plates in Facsimile and an Introductory Essay. Catalogue of the exhibition held May 5–20, 1892. (Digitized on HathiTrust and Internet Archive).
1894: Charles Dexter Allen. A classified list of early American
book-plates with a brief description of the principal styles and a note as to
the prominent engravers. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1894: Bollioud-Mermet. Crazy book-collecting or bibliomania: showing the great folly of
collecting rare and curious books, first editions, unique and large paper
copies, in costly bindings, etc. (New York: Duprat & Co.; Digitized on HathiTrust).
"By Bollioud-Mermet, Secretary to the Academy of Lyons; first published anonymously in 1761, and now done into English and republished for the perusal and delectation of the members of the Grolier Club of New York et amicorum."
1895: A description of the early printed books owned by the Grolier Club, with
a brief account of their printers and a history of typography to the fifteenth
century. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1895: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Engraved Portraits of Women Writers
from Sappho to George Eliot, at the Grolier Club ... From March the
Seventh to March the Twenty-Third, MDCCCXCV. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1895: The catalogue of books from the libraries or collections of celebrated
bibliophiles and illustrious persons of the past with arms or devices upon the
bindings. Exhibited at the Grolier Club in the month of January 1895. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1896: Arthur Warren. The Charles Whittinghams, printers. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1896: Catalogue of an exhibition illustrative of a centenary of artistic
lithography, 1796-1896 at the Grolier Club ... March the sixth to
March the twenty-eighth, 1896. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1899: Catalogue of decorated early English bookbindings exhibited at the
Grolier Club, 1899. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1900: A Translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante. With an Introduction and a Note on the Portraits of Dante by G. R. Carpenter. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1901: The history of Helyas, Knight of the Swan. Translated by
Robert Copland from the French version published in Paris in 1504. A literal
reprint in the types of Wynkin de Worde after the unique copy printed by him
upon parchment in London, MCCCCCXII. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1901: Catalogue of an exhibition of selected works of the poets laureate of
England. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1902: One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1905: Catalogue of an exhibition of French engravings of the eighteenth
century, in black and white and in colors: exhibited at the Grolier Club from
Saturday April 29, to Saturday May 20, MDCCCCV. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1907: Le Roux de Lincy. Researches concerning Jean Grolier, His Life and His Library. With a Partial Catalogue of his Books by A.-J.-V. Le Roux de Lincy ; edited by Baron Roger Portalis ; translated and revised by Carolyn Shipman. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1907: David McNeely Stauffer. American engravers upon copper and steel. (Digitized on HathiTrust, vol. 1 and vol. 2)
1910: The Etched Work of Whistler: Illustrated by Reproductions in Collotype of the Different States of the Plates. Compiled,
arranged and described by Edward G. Kennedy, with an introduction by Royal
Cortissoz. (New York: The Club, 1910). (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1913: [Baziliōlogia] : A booke of kings: Notes on a rare series of
engraved English royal portraits from William the Conqueror to James I.,
published under the above title in 1618. By H. C. Levis. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1914: Franklin and his press at Passy: An account of the books,
pamphlets, and leaflets printed there, including the long-lost 'Bagatelles, by Luther S. Livingston. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1915: New York: A series of wood engravings in colour and a note on
colour printing by Rudolph Ruzicka. With prose impressions of the city by
Walter Pritchard Eaton. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1923: Ernest Dowson. The Pierrot of the minute. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1924: Louis V. Ledoux. A descriptive catalogue of an exhibition of Japanese figure prints from Moronobu to Toyokuni. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1931: Lawrence C. Wroth. The Colonial Printer. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1942: The United States navy, 1776 to 1815, depicted in an exhibition of
prints of American naval engagements and American naval commanders held at the
Grolier club November 19, 1942 to January 17, 1943. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1949: Henry Watson Kent. What I am pleased to call my education. (New York: The Club, 1949). (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1950: John T. Winterich, The Grolier Club, 1884-1950: An Informal History. (Digitized on HathiTrust).
1973: Michael D. Coe. The Maya scribe and his world. (Digitized on Mesoweb).