Grolier Club

The Grolier Club is a society, not a person. Founded in New York in 1884 by nine men in the book trade and named after Jean Grolier, the sixteenth-century French treasurer whose bindings collectors still chase, it exists to study the book as an object: printing, binding, illustration, collecting. Its publications are catalogues and bibliographies, produced in small editions for members and for libraries, and the ten titles catalogued under its name are of that kind, among them A Catalogue of One Hundred Illustrated Books, 1472-1896. The club keeps a research library on East 60th Street that the public may use, and mounts exhibitions free of charge. Whoever compiled any given volume is named inside it rather than on the spine.