Imaginary Books, Billy Budd, Mark Twain and Small Press Poetry in Grolier Exhibition Schedule

The Grolier Club has announced its Fall 2024 – Spring 2025 exhibition details which include one hundred years of Billy Budd, Lincoln’s life in print, a look at imaginary books, a tribute to Mark Twain, a focus on visual and experimental poetry post-1960s, and a history of the development of New York. 

* Melville’s Billy Budd at 100: September 12 – November 9, 2024

This will commemorate the centenary of the posthumous and first publication of Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1924). It highlights the composition, preservation, discovery, and ongoing transmission of this work left unfinished on Melville’s desk at his death in 1891. Curated by Grolier Club member William Palmer Johnston from his extensive Melville Collection, the exhibition features more than 50 items including multiple scholarly transcriptions of the Billy Budd manuscript as well as illustrations, photographs, dust jackets, movie posters, the opera libretto, playbills, a commemorative stamp, unique fine bindings for limited editions, and artwork by Barry Moser.

* Abraham Lincoln: His Life in Print: September 25 – December 28, 2024

The exhibition will use original printings of books and ephemera to create a sweeping, conceptual portrait of the man, featuring important editions of Lincoln’s greatest accomplishments including the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, the Cooper Union Speech, and his debates with Stephen A. Douglass. Featuring materials from the David M. Rubenstein Americana Collection, the exhibition is curated by Mazy Boroujerdi, special advisor to the collection, and will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Marquand Books.

* Imaginary Books: Lost, Unwritten, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books: December 5, 2024 – February 15, 2025

Part bibliophilic entertainment and part conceptual art installation, Imaginary Books: Lost, Unwritten, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books features a collection of books that do not really exist. Curated by Grolier Club member Reid Byers, the exhibition includes around 100 books and associated arealia from his collection – all simulacra created with a team of printers, bookbinders, artists, and calligraphers – of lost books that have no surviving example, unwritten books that were planned but left unfinished, and fictive works that exist only in fiction. Highlights  include William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won, Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, stolen from his wife’s bag on a French train in 1922, and the Necronomicon, John Dee’s copy of the eldritch grimoire that has been kept sealed in a Wells Fargo strongbox, as a precaution, since the Krickle accident of 1967.