America's oldest & largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts. (212) 838-6690, x7, [email protected].
(30)
Founded in 1884, the Grolier Club of New York is America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts. Named for Jean Grolier (1489 or 90-1565), the Renaissance collector renowned for sharing his library with friends, the Club’s objective is to foster “the study, collecting, and appreciation of books and works on paper.” The Club maintains a research library on
printing and related book arts, and its programs include public exhibitions as well as a long and distinguished series of publications. As part of its mission to promote the art and history of the book, the Grolier Club regularly hosts the lectures and gatherings of other bookish organizations, and opens many of its own events to the public. No advance notice is required to view Grolier Club exhibitions; however, RSVPs and reservations for other events should be made through Maev Brennan, tel.
Deirdre E. Lawrence, curator of 'Language, Decipherment, and Translation - From Then to Now' (Feb 29 to May 11, 2024), highlights The Book of Spells (2014) by Michael J. Winkler, a conceptual work exploring abstract imagery and hidden patterns in the signs of language.
Buildings come with blueprints, and the Grolier Club Library is currently rehousing our schematics from generations of construction and renovations throughout the Clubhouse. These well-used building documents show how much the these spaces have changed to support over a century of Club life here at 47 East 60th Street.
As we prepare for the upcoming season, we wanted to share excerpts from recent exhibitions. Jeffrey Johnson, curator of "Whodunit?" (Nov 30, 2023 - Feb 10, 2024), highlights his collection of 19th and 20th-century detective books.
August is a busy month for the Grolier Club Library. While our doors are closed to the public, we tackle the large-scale projects that help keep our collections accessible for the rest of the year. Maintenance has always been a critical part of any healthy library, as this catalogue from our collection demonstrates. In June of 1869, collector Francis Capper Brooke recorded the process of cleaning his entire library on one of the leaves of his extensive catalogue. It took eight days with as many as nine people working at a time to dust all 18,600 volumes in his collection, shelved throughout his estate at Ufford Place in Suffolk. Conveniently for modern researchers, Brooke wrote his account of the dusting project directly following the floorplans of his library, allowing us to visualize the process.
Spring has long sprung, and the Grolier Club is now closed for the month of August, but our exhibitions, including "New Members Collect," can still be visited online. Selections from Rodger Friedman’s collection of Remondini books feature covers of decorated papers with beautiful color woodcut designs. The example here is printed with Remondini blocks and hand-colored with red and ochre tints in a design that Rodger notes the “firm used frequently in various incarnations over the years” (no pun intended). The blocks used by the Remondini family, once thought lost, are now stored at Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa in Italy.
Flowers and books make good companions, as Suzanne Karr Schmidt reflects in her selections featured in our online exhibition. While preparing an exhibition on the history of artificial flowers as an undergraduate, she encountered a how-to handbook on flower making, “Art de Confectionner les Fleurs Artificielles” by a mysterious Frenchwoman, one Mme B.***. Suzanne writes that “Like many similar handbooks of the same era, the book contained descriptions of flower symbolism and functional plates outlining the shapes of petals and leaves for their construction,” and the exhibition became the basis of an early collection. That encounter with the 1850 edition at The Library of Congress was entirely unique, however, as it somewhat unexpectedly contained a real pressed flower!
Visit our online exhibition, and look out for information about our upcoming season! https://grolierclub.omeka.net/.../new-members-collect-2024
Photos
[1] Luigi Pagani Cesa, and others. La virtù, e la riconoscenza… Belluno: per Simone Tissi, 1791. Courtesy of Rodger Friedman.
[2] Mme Bl.*** (Mme Blocquel). Art de Confectionner Les Fleurs Artificielles. Paris: Delarue, c. 1880. Courtesy of Suzanne Karr Schmidt.
Pochoir is a technique for hand-coloring that simply means “stencil” in French. Jean Saudé’s 1925 treatise on the craft gives several examples and in-depth description of the process. Pochoir artists would cut copper stencils, sometimes with multiple parts, to build up layers of color that coalesce into the image. The stages of the process resemble progressive proofs of color woodcuts and lithographs, which were contemporary technologies at pochoir’s height in the early 20th century. It's notable that this hand-coloring technique was used for art, ephemera, and small-run trade publications alike, deep into the age of color printing.
Our final highlights from “New Members Collect” both capture moments in changing landscapes. Christopher Hammer’s map collection began with a Valentine’s Day gift from his partner and has grown to include maps of the Great Lakes region, from where they both hail. Vincenzo Coronelli, an Italian cartographer and globemaker to Louis XIV, produced this first printed identification of Chicago (“Chekagou,” from the Algonquin for “onion field”) only a decade and a half after the first non-indigenous people (Marquette and Joliet) passed through. Christopher writes, “Coronelli’s focus on the interior of the continent—the Great Lakes and the Upper Mississippi—reflect a shift in French imperial aims during the late 17th century to focus on the fur trade.”
Jeremy Rowe’s collection of historic photographs also captures slivers of time amidst a shifting city. The tintype on view here is of Loew Bridge, photographed by Silas A. Holmes in 1867. Named for New York City politician Charles Loew, this cast-iron bridge opened in 1866 in response to a request from businessman John Genin for pedestrians to cross Broadway near Saint Paul’s Cathedral at Fulton Street. Silas Holmes had a photographic studio adjacent to the bridge at 206 Broadway and produced many collodion tintype images of pedestrians posed on the bridge. But where did it go? Jeremy writes, “Businessmen on the west side, shadowed by the bridge, sued. The bridge was removed in 1868.” The photograph persists!
Explore geographies near and far by visiting “New Members Collect 2024,” open to the public free of charge Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm, or visit our online exhibition: https://grolierclub.omeka.net/.../new-members-collect-2024
Photos
[1] Vincenzo Maria Coronelli. “Partie Occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France.” Paris: Jean-Baptiste Nolin, 1688/[1690]. Courtesy of Christopher Hammer.
[2] Silas A. Holmes. Loew Bridge. ½ Plate tintype of the Loew Bridge built across Broadway at Fulton Street, Room 7, 206 Broadway, New York, New York, c. 1867. Courtesy of Jeremy Rowe
While one might presume that the invention of computers would ease the manual labor of dictionary making, language processing proved much harder than number-crunching—the original function of computers. Only towards the end of the 1970s did the speed, storage, and portability of computers make digital dictionaries a reality. The first standalone dictionaries to market were Lexicon [slide 1] and Craig M100 Translator [slide 2], both of which were bilingual dictionaries to translate between English and other languages. Both devices were slow, with limited storage, and the buzz of their initial success soon died off as limitations became apparent.
Hand-held dictionary devices didn’t seem to find their footing: This 1986 advertisement for “Word-Spell” describes a function much more similar to today’s spell-check—a typewriter-compatible dictionary that alerted writers to their spelling errors [slide 3].
As the World Wide Web emerged, web browsers won out over individual software packages as the medium for digital dictionaries. Just as publishers learned that sprawling dictionaries were financial sinks, they quickly learned the problem with the internet: no one wanted to pay to use an online dictionary. The medium changed, but the issue remains.
Learn more about developing digital dilemmas of dictionaries at “Hardly Harmless Drudgery.” For one final weekend, open to the public free of charge, Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm, or visit the online exhibition: https://grolierclub.omeka.net/exhibits/show/lexicography
Credit
Advertisement for the Brother “Word-Spell” Electronic Dictionary, 1986. Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. Image courtesy of Bryan A. Garner.
LK-3000. Lexicon Corporation, 1978. With The Craig M100 Translator and Information Center. Craig Corporation, 1979. Ex coll. Jack Lynch. Image courtesy of Jack Lynch.
When the Club acquired this set of 19th century book cover design mock-ups for our Library, we thought we were getting a useful teaching example. However, once cataloger Janalyn Martinez began to describe them, she quickly realized that these three sheets of paper were something much more intriguing. Follow the link below to read her blog post, which delves into the murky world of illicit po*******hy in Victorian New York and the mysterious publisher William Haines who lurks behind the innocent façade of these cover designs.
By Janalyn Martinez, Cataloger Printing Mock-ups for Book Design Cover. The Grolier Club of New York, \*56.3\S616\1846. The Grolier Club recently acquired book cover mock-ups for a novel titled “Ad…
“Everything old is new again,” a maxim so seen in Alvin Patrick’s and Molly Manning’s collections on view in “New Members Collect,” which both feature texts revived by new printings or interpretations.
On view from Alvin’s collection are three 19th-century books that found renewed life in the 21st century, including “The Underground Railroad” by William Still, which chronicles the stories of over 600 enslaved persons who escaped to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Still interviewed each person and compiled detailed documentation that serves as the definitive record of the secret network of escape routes and safe houses. One hundred and forty-four years later, in 2016, Colson Whitehead wrote an historical novel of the same name. Whitehead’s fantastical book about a slave fleeing on an actual rail system won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
Molly Manning’s collection, previously on view in the exhibition “The Best-Read Army in the World,” also includes texts made new again. Though the novel is now a classroom mainstay, this pocket-sized Armed Services Edition of “The Great Gatsby” is “credited with rescuing the book from obscurity.” Due to its poor sales upon initial publication in 1925, Fitzgerald considered Gatsby a failure. Molly writes, however, “In October 1945, 155,000 Armed Services Editions of Gatsby were sent to U.S. troops, and interest in the title blossomed. Thanks to this miniature edition, Gatsby became an American classic.”
See the old made new again by visiting “New Members Collect 2024,” open to the public free of charge Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm, or visit our online exhibition: https://grolierclub.omeka.net/.../new-members-collect-2024
Photos
[1] William Still. The Underground Railroad. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872. Courtesy of Alvin A. Patrick.
[2] F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. Editions for the Armed Services, Inc., No. 862. Courtesy of Molly Guptill Manning.
By the 20th century, the “duty of the dictionary” coalesced on a set of principles: composed by a team of professionals, informed by the latest thinking on historical philology, and as comprehensive of the language as possible. Dictionary publishers boasted about the number of entries and began pushing the term “unabridged,” aspiring to authority and monumentality.
No dictionary captures the notion of monumentality more tangibly than the 1914 special one-volume version of “The Century Dictionary and Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language.” Produced on ultra-thin India paper with corduroy covers, it was made to lie flat, with a highly flexible spine that would form itself into an upside-down U. It is undoubtedly the thickest one-volume dictionary ever produced, issued by the same editors who championed these new duties.
Visit “Hardly Harmless Drudgery” to see this gargantuan accomplishment in person. Open to the public free of charge, Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm, or visit the online exhibition: https://grolierclub.omeka.net/exhibits/show/lexicography
Credit
William Dwight Whitney, ed. The Century Dictionary and Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language. New York: Century Co., 1914. Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. Image courtesy of Bryan A. Garner.
Rare Book School returns to the Grolier Club this week for Tony White’s “The History of Artists’ Books since 1950”. Tony’s class gives us an opportunity to highlight some of our artist books, including two copies from our collection of Flockophobic Press imprints: “On the slates” and “Strip poker”. These “stunning objects that happen to be books” inspired us to stage our own playful photos in the Library. Don’t worry! No books were harmed in the making of these jokes!
Big-name lexicographers like Johnson and Webster abound, but undoubtedly the most popular writer ever to have engaged in serious lexicography was J.R.R. Tolkien. At Oxford, Tolkien was tutored by three great philologists: Kenneth Sisam, Joseph Wright, and William Craigie. After serving in the first World War, he returned to Oxford and worked under Henry Bradley on the Oxford English Dictionary—mostly in the Ws. Oxford University Press still maintains his manuscript notes.
Tolkien’s Middle English Vocabulary (not to be confused with Middle Earth Vocabulary) began as a glossary to accompany Kenneth Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, published in 1921 with copious notes but no glossary. Sisam pulled Tolkien off the OED staff to complete it. Tolkien’s glossary, with 4,500 entries and 6,800 definitions, is fastidious: each definition is keyed to a textual passage. All 15,000 citations had to be individually identified and selected. The book also has 1,900 cross-references, often to account for linguistic variants. More interesting adventures lay ahead.
Visit “Hardly Harmless Drudgery” to learn more about Tolkein and other literary giants whose lives brushed with lexicographic endeavors. Open to the public free of charge, Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm, or visit the online exhibition: https://grolierclub.omeka.net/exhibits/show/lexicography
Credit
Bust of J.R.R. Tolkien by Stephen Paterson.
J.R.R. Tolkien. A Middle English Vocabulary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922. Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. Images courtesy of Bryan A. Garner
Any good collection on the history of the book trade will preserve some trace of its many personalities and their witticisms, in-jokes, and occasional barbs. Ian Jackson printed a handful of books for California book fairs during the 1990s—these pages gave Grolier Club librarians a good laugh. Please note that no current Club employee has encountered a Bore in at least several months.
Please note: The Grolier Club will be closed for the Fourth of July. We will reopen with regular hours on Friday, July 5th.
By the 20th century, lexicographers had begun to eschew the individual obsessive in favor of collective compilation to develop comprehensive dictionaries. The resulting works were larger, accommodated by improved printing technology. Nonetheless, advancements in machine presses couldn’t reduce the one-to-one ratio of pages to plates, and the Oxford English Dictionary required 15,487 steel plates of 3.5 pounds each for its 15,487 pages. The plate pictured here, which produced vol. 12, p. 318, is one of 100 to 300 plates that were spared the scrap heap in the 1980s, when OED shifted to computerized typesetting.
These resource-intensive, expensive, and thus low-selling volumes prompted the Oxford University Press to issue a cheaper, handier, and more profitable spinoff from its big dictionary. The first abridgement to market was “The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English,” the work of the Fowler brothers of usage fame. Because the OED had reached only R, the Fowlers had to produce all new material for S to Z. Selling for three shillings sixpence, the book proved immediately successful, with strong reviews and sales of 40,000 copies in the first year.
Visit “Hardly Harmless Drudgery” to learn more about the publishing gambles of dictionaries, the inescapable economic sinkholes. Open to the public free of charge, Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm, or visit the online exhibition: https://grolierclub.omeka.net/exhibits/show/lexicography
Credit
OED printing plate for vol. 12, sig. 62, p. 318. Steel and antimony. Ca. 1928.
H.W. Fowler & F.G. Fowler, eds. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911. Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. Images courtesy of Bryan A. Garner
The Grolier Club is delighted to welcome our 2024 William H. Helfand Fellow, Eva Dema, to the library. Eva comes from the University of Cambridge, where she is a PhD candidate in English. Her research here focuses on American collectors acquiring British literary manuscripts of contemporary authors in the decades around the turn of the 20th-century. She has come to the Grolier Club for our unique archival and auction catalogue collections, which offer rich repositories for studying the history of the antiquarian book trade. We are excited to support Eva’s research, and anyone interested in learning more about the William H. Helfand Fellowship can visit the Library page of our website.
The material traces of notable historical and cultural figures remain of keen interest to two of our collectors on view in our physical and online exhibitions of “New Members Collect.” In addition to collecting books on cricket, Ferose Velloparampil Rasheed began a second collection of his favorite modern Indian authors, which grew to material signed by India’s most notable cultural and political figures. Ferose searched for years for a book signed by the Mahatma, and this edition of C.F. Andrews’s “Mahatma Gandhi’s Ideas” is particularly notable, given that Gandhi signed in Hindi, rather than English, as was more typical for him.
Anne-Marie Springer also focuses on inscribed and signed material, particularly the personal love letters of cultural figures. The letter on view here is among the first that Anne-Marie acquired: “Written on May 9, 1796, as Napoleon is conquering Italy, this passionate letter is an answer to Josephine’s letter announcing that she is pregnant and therefore cannot travel to join him. It is a blatant lie, of course: Josephine is having a wonderful time in Paris with her lover and has no intention of joining her new husband on the battlefields.”
See Ferose’s distinctive materials by visiting “New Members Collect 2024,” open to the public free of charge Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm, and visit Anne-Marie's collection online: https://grolierclub.omeka.net/.../new-members-collect-2024
Photos
[1] C.F. Andrews. Mahatma Gandhi’s Ideas: Including Selections from his Writings. New York: Macmillan, 1930. Signed by Gandhi in Hindi. Courtesy of Ferose Velloparampil Rasheed.
[2] Napoleon Bonaparte to Joséphine de Beauharnais. Autographed Signed Letter. May 9, 1796. Courtesy of Anne-Marie Springer.
The Grolier Club's Library hosts rotating exhibits of our own collections in the four cases we have in the Reading Room. Our current exhibit, "Printing Non-Latin Characters in the Grolier Club's Collection," curated by Librarian Jamie Cumby, looks at some of the books that push the literal and metaphorical boundaries of our collection's historic focus on the European and American book world. The 14 examples chosen for this exhibition bring together texts in classical, living, and written languages that span five centuries, 14 alphabets, and four printing techniques, produced for churches, states, scholars, students, and commerce. Follow the link to our blog to read more!
By Jamie Cumby, Librarian 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…
Praise for Hardly Harmless Drudgery, on view through July 26 at The Grolier Club.
Noah Webster’s dominion over American dictionaries did not come without its detractors and dilettantes. As Curators Bryan A. Garner and Jack Lynch write, "Once Americans thought the name Webster to be synonymous with ‘the dictionary,’ other dictionaries began to appear as ‘Webster’s.’ The name began losing the distinctiveness that might have allowed it to serve as a trademark.”
Throughout the mid-20th century, Merriam’s public-relations campaign urged people to think of Merriam’s dictionaries as the only ones legitimately called Webster, as seen here in a 1930s advertisement. Their efforts were largely successful among the intelligentsia, but the road to reclamation was neither clear nor smooth. Today, “Webster’s” is now available to anyone who might create or publish a dictionary of any kind or quality.
Visit “Hardly Harmless Drudgery” to learn more about the trademark troubles of the Webster’s name. Open to the public free of charge, Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm, or visit the online exhibition: https://grolierclub.omeka.net/exhibits/show/lexicography
Credit
“Warning! When you say ‘Webster’s Dictionary’ you mean MERRIAM-Webster.” 1930s. Advertisement. Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. Image courtesy of Bryan A. Garner
Please note: The Grolier Club will be closed today, June 19, for Juneteenth. We will reopen with regular hours tomorrow, June 20.
Niche periodical alert: The Grolier Club library frequently documents the intertwined histories of book collecting and conservation. What collector has not mourned a book whose brittle pages crumble at the slightest touch! This serial, the Alkaline Paper Advocate, spoke out to raise awareness and increase availability of acid-free paper. We only hold this first issue, but the Alkaline Paper Advocate ran for more than fifty issues between 1988 and 1997, when it ended with a well-deserved moment of self-congratulation: “Now that most U.S. consumers know they have access to a wide variety of alkaline papers, and now that the historical transition to a new kind of papermaking has been recorded, the APA's mission has been accomplished.” If anyone knows where we might pick up a copy of this final issue, please be in touch!
Join Lynda Mugglestone for her lecture on Samuel Johnson's Garret Lexicography, the final lecture in our series on "Hardly Harmless Drudgery," next Wednesday, June 26, at 6pm ET. Register now, and read on for more information: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/in-person-talk-lynda-mugglestone-on-samuel-johnsons-garret-lexicography-tickets-907930744297?aff=oddtdtcreator
Professor Mugglestone, author of "The Oxford History of English" [Oxford University Press, 2006], in her research focuses on a wide range of linguistic, social and cultural aspects in the history of English (from about 1750 on). She has particular interests in the history of pronunciation and of dictionaries, and has written a number of books and articles on lexicography between 1700 and the present, including "Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words," and earlier books on Dr. Johnson and on the Oxford English Dictionary.
Stephanie Kimbro Dolin’s visually stunning collection centers her interests in fine press, design binding, and her own practice as printer and bookmaker, with sumptuous illustrations to boot. On view here is her copy of “Salmacis and Hemaphroditus,” featuring 11 color wood engravings by John Buckland Wright. The frontispiece and title page exemplify her fondness of Wright’s “combination of colors to create sensual illustrations of the human form in water.” Stephanie notes that “Buckland Wright’s collaboration with Chistopher Sandford at the [Golden Cockerel] Press led to beautiful erotic books that were designed in a calculated way to please subscribers and sell books.”
Hélène Golay’s collection of reader intervention in books is similarly graphically striking and feature books peppered with original illustrations, as seen on this edition of “To***co Road” by Erskine Caldwell. Golay notes that “An early owner has fashioned a home-made dust jacket out of construction paper to which they have mounted their own original water-colors to the upper jacket and spine panels. The artwork is a bit crude— there seems to be a disembodied human leg floating to the left of the depicted scene.”
Enjoy the visual variety of our members’ collections by visiting “New Members Collect 2024,” open to the public free of charge Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm, or visit our online exhibition: https://grolierclub.omeka.net/.../new-members-collect-2024
Photos:
[1] John Buckland Wright, Francis Beaumont, Gwyn Jones. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. A Poem. London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1951. Transcribed and introduced by Gwyn Jones. Courtesy of Stephanie Kimbro Dolin.
[2] Erskine Caldwell. To***co Road. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, [1932]. Courtesy of Hélène Golay.
Slots are still available to join co-curator Jack Lynch for an in-person tour of "Hardly Harmless Drudgery" next Thursday, June 20, at 1pm! Register now:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/in-person-tour-hardly-harmless-drudgery-black-american-dictionaries-tickets-907922619997?aff=oddtdtcreator
We featured this portrait of the legendary bookseller John de Verdion in our blog in 2020, but our Library also holds a copy of the catalogue from the sale of his library.
De Verdion, assigned female at birth, first began living as a man in his native Germany in 1763. He emigrated to London after being outed in Berlin and lived out the rest of his life as a fixture of the London book world. He was a noted eccentric, traveling with folios tucked under his arms, pockets bursting with smaller volumes, and an ever-present umbrella. This satirical portrait, created posthumously for his entry in the 1803 edition of “Kirby’s Wonderful Museum,” depicts him with his characteristic hat and umbrella.
De Verdion leveraged his connections at Court to supplement his bookselling, teaching language classes to London’s elite. His pupils included dukes, ambassadors, and the historian Edward Gibbon. This business enabled him to buy aggressively at auction, acquiring books by the coach-load. The posthumous sale of his collection, regrettably combined with an anonymous collector, took place over the course of nine days and included 2265 lots. Though it is impossible to un-pick De Verdion’s books from the other collector’s, the collection features a number of dictionaries which he may have used in teaching, and copies of work by his former students.
Join co-curator Jack Lynch for an in-person lecture on "The Frontiers of Anglicity," next Monday, June 17, at 6pm. This is part four of our lecture series in conjunction with "Hardly Harmless Drudgery," on view in our Ground Floor Gallery. Register now, and read on for more information: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/907906732477?aff=oddtdtcreator
Dr. Lynch, a Grolier member since 2019, is Distinguished Professor of English and Department Chair at Rutgers University, where he has taught since 1998. His scholarly work focuses on 18th-c. British literature, especially Samuel Johnson; the history of the English language; forgery, fakery and fraud; satire; and literary biography; and he is the author of several books on these subjects, including an abridgment of Dr. Johnson's "Dictionary," a biography of Shakespeare that begins with his death and ends with his 300th birthday, a history of the idea of "proper" English, and a wide-ranging history of reference books from ancient Mesopotamian tablets to the latest updates on Wikipedia.
While English dictionaries aspired to cover the whole language in ever greater detail, curators Bryan A. Garner and Jack Lynch note that, in practice, “‘the whole language’ usually just meant the language of highly educated urbanites. Yet English is much more.” In the late 18th-century, a tradition of documenting the language of provinces, underworld, and subcultures emerged to counter this exclusionary notion.
“The Queens’ Vernacular” [left] was one such dictionary in that lineage, published in 1972, a tenuous period just three years after the Stonewall uprising, when “homosexuality was still illegal in 46 of the 50 states,” writes curators Bryan A. Garner and Jack Lynch. Undeterred, Bruce Rodgers issued this “dictionary of homophile cant,” affirming that “gay slang, like Black slang, enriches our language immeasurably.” This inexpensive paperback in brilliant lavender—the color associated with gay rights before the LGBTQ rainbow edged it out—was meant to reach a wide audience.
“A Feminist Dictionary” [slide 2], on the other hand, used the dictionary format to encourage readers to question the ideology behind ostensibly neutral and objective reference books, which authors and Professors Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler note are “constructed almost entirely by men with male readers and users in mind.” The inversion of the formal conventions results in an avowed polemic rather than a work of practical lexicography.
Join Curator Jack Lynch for a Pride Month-themed lunchtime exhibition tour this Thursday, June 13, to discuss the history of q***r dictionaries and dictionaries for the subaltern, subcultures, and subjugated. “Hardly Harmless Drudgery” is open to the public free of charge, Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm, or visit the online exhibition: https://grolierclub.omeka.net/exhibits/show/lexicography
Credit
Bruce Rodgers. The Queens’ Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972. Ex coll. Jack Lynch.
Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler, with Ann Russo. A Feminist Dictionary. Boston: Pandora Press, 1985. Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner.
47 E 60th Street
New York, NY
10022
| Monday | 10am - 4pm |
| Tuesday | 10am - 4pm |
| Wednesday | 10am - 4pm |
| Thursday | 10am - 4pm |
| Friday | 10am - 4pm |
| Saturday | 10am - 5pm |
Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The Grolier Club of New York posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Send a message to The Grolier Club of New York:
Deirdre E. Lawrence, curator of 'Language, Decipherment, and Translation - From Then to Now' (Feb 29 to May 11, 2024), highlights The Book of Spells (2014) by Michael J. Winkler, a conceptual work exploring abstract imagery and hidden patterns in the signs of language.
As we prepare for the upcoming season, we wanted to share excerpts from recent exhibitions. Jeffrey Johnson, curator of "Whodunit?" (Nov 30, 2023 - Feb 10, 2024), highlights his collection of 19th and 20th-century detective books.
The most controversial dictionary ever. Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961), edited by Phillip B. Gove, who believed dictionaries should be objective, scientific, and modern, shocked the literary world by including terms like "ain't" as Standard English, challenging the prevailing view of dictionaries as unquestionable authorities.
Bryan A. Garner, curator of Hardly Harmless Drudgery, presents a selection of "offbeat" English dictionaries, mostly from the collection of co-curator Jack Lynch. Including: "The Queen's Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon" (1972), "The New Cab Calloway's Hepsters Dictionary" (1944), the first dictionary on computer slang, "CoEvolution Quarterly 29:26–35" (1981), and "A Feminist Dictionary" (1985).
American Museum of Natural History
Central Park West
Youth Insights at the Whitney Museum
Gansevoort Street
