On five American book clubs, a sixteenth-century motto, and the old question of who counts as a friend
Between 1884 and 1895, collectors in five American cities founded clubs devoted to the book as an object. What has tested them longest is not the book but the company: who is asked in, and who is kept at the door.
The Rowfant Club of Cleveland keeps hundreds of candlesticks. On Wednesdays they are set out to hold places at dinner, and once a year, at the annual meeting on Candlemas, one is lit for every member. The candlestick is a groundhog sitting upright on an open book, holding the candle; Ernest Thompson Seton drew it, and Tiffany cast it in 1903. The club’s library holds about eleven thousand books, and since 2020 every one of them has passed through the hands of Amy Dawson, a cataloguer who works as the club’s library consultant, and who found there, in the first year of the pandemic, the quiet of an old building. Five years on, she still could not be a member. There is no candlestick for her.
The Rowfant is one of five American book clubs founded within eleven years of one another. The oldest is the Grolier Club of New York, founded on a January evening in 1884 when Robert Hoe invited eight friends to his home. Boston’s Club of Odd Volumes followed in 1887, Cleveland in 1892, Philadelphia’s Philobiblon in 1893, and Chicago’s Caxton Club in 1895. Each has its own words for what it is for. What the five have in common is the form: a society whose members are chosen. Three of them, in New York, Chicago and Cleveland, have left a public record of how they did the choosing; Boston and Philadelphia have said far less about theirs.
Jean Grolier, the French treasurer the New York club is named for, stamped his bindings in the sixteenth century Io. Grolierii et amicorum: belonging to Grolier and his friends. The motto is read as generosity, a man who shared his books. It is also a list. A club’s work is largely the list: who is invited, who is proposed, who is balloted, who dines. In Cleveland the list once kept a Black novelist from being invited and, eight years later, let him in. For most of a century, in all five cities, it kept out women. Then the clubs went two ways, and the question underneath, now that the book is common and some of the doors are open, is whether a bibliophile society is still about the book at all.
I
One Copy of Every Book
Sir Thomas Phillipps, born in Manchester in 1792, called himself a vello-maniac. He spent a fortune on some sixty thousand manuscripts and forty thousand printed books, and when it was spent he went into debt, and he wrote to a friend that he was buying printed books because he wished to have one copy of every book in the world. The collection was dispersed after his death, and part of it now lines a room on the fourth floor of a building on East 60th Street in Manhattan, where a quantity of his loose papers, bought in 2003 and installed in a display closet, grew mold and had to be sent away for treatment.
The building is the Grolier Club. On the evening of January 23, 1884, Robert Hoe, whose family firm built printing presses, invited eight fellow bibliophiles to his home in New York to talk about books: less, as Lauren Kane writes in Apollo this month, about what was being published than about how. Among the nine was Theodore Low De Vinne, the printer, who would print most of the club’s early books. The first of them, issued that same year, was a reprint of a decree of the Star Chamber from 1637 concerning printing, a law that had forbidden any man in England to own type or a press without the authorities’ leave, and it was De Vinne who urged the choice. Hoe called the result “a pretty nice specimen of printing.”
They named the club for Jean Grolier, a sixteenth-century treasurer of France whose library was famous. The club’s constitution commits it to “the acquisition, furnishing and maintenance of a suitable club building,” and in 1890 the members built one, on land Hoe provided, at 29 East 32nd Street. In 1917 they moved to the house on 60th Street where part of Phillipps’s collection now sits. A candidate for membership is proposed in writing by a member and supported by letters from three more.
A single Gutenberg Bible touches three of the five clubs. It had belonged to Brayton Ives, one of the nine, a Civil War general and a former president of the New York Stock Exchange, who sold a library at auction in 1891. It later belonged to James W. Ellsworth of Chicago, who, by the Caxton Club journal’s account, paid $14,800 for it at auction and was that club’s first president. In 1924 the Philadelphia dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach, whose name the Philobiblon’s meeting place now carries, sold it to John Scheide, and in 2014 Scheide’s son left it to Princeton.
Phillipps wanted one copy of every book in the world, and said so with three exclamation marks. The club that now keeps a piece of what he gathered chose for its first publication a law about who might own a press. Between those two facts lies a good deal of what a bibliophile society is: not the whole of print, which Phillipps wanted and could not have, but a selection, made by a few, printed well, and kept by a club that has outlasted both Phillipps’s library and Ives’s.
II
Properly Qualified
When fifteen bibliophiles founded the Caxton Club of Chicago in January 1895, on an idea that began among men at McClurg’s bookstore, the club admitted men only, as, Dan Crawford notes in the club’s own history of the episode, most clubs of the 1890s did. Some members wanted women admitted from the start. The club was inviting women to its events as early as 1897, though rarely. A proposal to admit them came up about once a decade, and each decade had its reason against. In the early 1960s it was the Cliff Dwellers, where the club then met, which itself barred women. In the early 1970s three officers took the question up, among them the president, Sam Rosenthal, whose wife, Marie-Louise, was a noted collector and could not join. The opposition, which had major donors and officers in its ranks, asked the Mid-Day Club, also a men’s club, to forbid the change as the Cliff Dwellers had. The Mid-Day declined.
In 1975 the Council voted ten to five in favor. That admitted no one. The Council had approved women only if a poll of the whole membership agreed, and so every member received a ballot with two boxes, to favor or to oppose the election of “properly qualified women.” The opponents called the wording unfair. As Crawford gives their objection: “What husband would dare suggest that his wife was NOT properly qualified?” One member wrote in the margin to ask when the club meant to admit some properly qualified men. A hundred and seventy-six members replied. A hundred and forty-two were in favor, thirty against, and four abstained, and most of the thirty were non-resident members who seldom came to meetings.
Out of worry about what the club might become if women came in numbers, the first intake was limited to five, and on January 12, 1976, it elected them: Karen A. Skubish, Mary Beth Beal, Mary Lynn McCree, Suzette Morton Davidson and Frances Hamill. Beal became the club’s first woman president. The limit did not last, and by 2010 about a quarter of the members were women. The Philobiblon in Philadelphia, by one record, had admitted women two years before Chicago, in 1974. In the same archive file as the ballots is a letter from the Grolier Club asking how the Caxtonians had done it. It is undated. The Grolier admitted its first women in 1976.
The Grolier’s librarian did not live to be one of them. Ruth Shepard Granniss ran its library from 1906 to 1944, could never have joined the club she served, and died in 1954. She was among the founders of the Hroswitha Club, which first met on November 16, 1944, at the Cosmopolitan Club in New York, convened by Sarah Gildersleeve Fife, with Belle da Costa Greene of the Morgan Library also among its founders, and which met for sixty years. In 1926, eighteen years before that first meeting, it was Greene who opened the bidding at the New York auction of the Melk abbey’s Gutenberg Bible; Rosenbach won it for $106,000, then reported as the highest price ever paid for a book. When the Grolier opened its membership in 1976, a number of the Hroswitha’s members were in the first group to join.
The opponents’ objection gave away what the vote was about. If no husband would dare call his own wife unqualified, the standard was never going to be applied, and what the members were deciding was who would be in the room.
III
Baxter’s Procrustes
In 1899 Houghton Mifflin published The Conjure Woman, a collection of stories by Charles W. Chesnutt of Cleveland, and, at the Rowfant Club’s suggestion, a limited edition of it in a hundred and fifty numbered copies. Three years later he was prevented from receiving an invitation to the same club because he was Black. The Library of America says he had applied and that one or two members judged it too soon; Cleveland Magazine’s word is “blackballed.” In June 1904 he published a story called “Baxter’s Procrustes.”
It concerns the Bodleian Club, a society of gentlemen of culture with a handsome clubhouse, a collection of pipes, and publications in which, the narrator confesses, contents matter less than linen paper, uncut edges and wide margins. The club resolves to print a poem by Baxter, perhaps its most scholarly member, in fifty numbered copies on Kelmscott paper bound in dark green morocco, and the committee, with great delicacy, does not read the manuscript. A member reads out a magazine note that a sealed copy of a Grolier Club publication has sold for three hundred dollars, and subscribers are offered their copies sealed. The narrator, appointed to review the poem, will not spoil his own copy by opening it. In the smoking-room the reviewers compare notes on a poem none of them can have read, and the narrator pronounces the letterpress “of course De Vinne’s best.” On the review night a young English visitor cuts the leaves with the paper knife and finds there is not a single line in it. Baxter offers to pay the bills; it is more than hinted that his resignation would be accepted; he never sends it, and goes to Europe. The president of the club draws the moral. Baxter’s book, he says, might be considered the acme of bookmaking. “To the true collector, a book is a work of art, of which the contents are no more important than the words of an opera.” At the next auction a sealed copy brings two hundred and fifty dollars, “the highest price ever brought by a single volume published by the club.”
The Chesnutt Archive describes the story as a mild satire of collectors and the clubs they form. The Bibliographical Society of America reads it as a comic critique of the book clubs of its day and an apt reply to his exclusion. The Library of America says he aimed it at the Rowfant’s members. The story names only the Bodleian and, inside it, the Grolier Club and De Vinne.
In 1910 the Rowfant reversed itself and admitted him; the Library of America calls him its first African American member. He gave nine lectures there over the next fourteen years, the last on valentines; his daughter recalled his Saturday nights at the club, where, as the Library of America quotes her, “he basked in the warm rays of friendship for which his lonely heart had yearned”; he was a member when he died in 1932.
In the story, the president gives his verdict to “a select few of us who sat around the fireplace.” In 1966 the Rowfant reprinted it in a limited edition of a hundred and fifty copies, by the count of the Chesnutt scholar Charles Duncan: the size of the edition of The Conjure Woman it had suggested in 1899.
IV
The Candle
The Rowfant Club was founded on February 29, 1892, and named for Rowfant, the Sussex house of Frederick Locker-Lampson, an English collector and writer of light verse. Its object, in its own words, is “primarily the critical study of books in their various capacities to please the mind of man,” and it meets in a house built in 1838 and moved to its present site on Prospect Avenue in 1895.
In 1955 the club’s historian, Russell H. Anderson, counted its exclusion of women among its firmest traditions. Members, he wrote, would have vehemently denied that it came from jealousy or from any low opinion of women’s learning, and he wondered whether “the dread of napkins and mould salad” at the evening snack had played some part.
Women may come to the Rowfant as guests, attend its Wednesday-evening and Friday-lunch lectures and work in its library, but they may not join. That was the rule when Katherine Churchill reported on the club for Defector in June 2025, the most recent public account; I have found nothing since to say it has changed. With Boston’s Club of Odd Volumes, founded in 1887, the Rowfant was then one of only two rare book clubs in the country that still admitted no women. Neither belonged any longer to the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies, which grew out of a meeting at the Rowfant’s own centennial in 1992. The fellowship’s former president told Churchill that the Rowfant and the fellowship had parted by mutual agreement, and that she hoped the club would one day reconsider.
Amy Dawson began working on that library in 2020, as a consultant to the club. She has handled every one of its roughly eleven thousand items, and she called it, in a way, “untouched ground.” Talking with members over bindings and fine press books, she told Churchill, she had found her tribe. She also told Churchill it struck her as funny that the people by whom she felt most understood were all men, and she wondered whether they saw her the way she saw them.
In 1902, by the Library of America’s account, “one or two members thought the time hadn’t come.” In 2025 a person familiar with the club’s workings told Churchill that the policy was what it was because that was how the club had been formed, and allowed that it kept out people who would make good members. The club did not comment to Churchill.
Dawson told Churchill, “I think I would be a wonderful Rowfant member.” Elsewhere in the article she said that she already had the benefits of a member: members pressed their guest tickets on her, and she could come to lunch when she liked. She is not the first. Ruth Granniss kept the Grolier’s library for thirty-eight years and could never join it. The Rowfant has lost nothing it can measure by keeping Dawson out. What it has lost is the chance to count among its friends one of the people who know its library best.
V
The Thousandth Exhibition
In September, when Kane visited for her Apollo piece, the Grolier Club was marking its thousandth public exhibition. It mounts seven a year. Proposals go to a committee of members and may come from people who are not members at all. The club’s director, Declan Kiely, came two years ago from the New York Public Library, where he had directed special collections and exhibitions, and has since endowed a post for a director of exhibitions and communications. The show on view, proposed by members with the arts collective Dieu Donné, founded in 1976, surveyed fifty years of its work: pulp painted, sheets watermarked, paper blown out with water while it was still forming.
The library upstairs is modeled on Wren’s at Trinity College, Cambridge. On a table there the newest catalogues of auction houses and dealers are set out for members, from Christie’s to a bookseller in New Jersey. The word that kept coming up on Kane’s visit was provenance, and what lit collectors up, she found, was not first editions but the old sale catalogues and logs in which collectors of the past kept track of what they owned. Members vote on which archives coming up for sale the club should buy, and the library is open to researchers and scholars. The most recent number of the club’s Gazette, its seventy-fifth, is built loosely around women collectors and their part in the club.
All of the Grolier’s eight hundred or so members are collectors, though the requirement, as Kane puts it, is broad. The examples Kiely gave her were paperbacks from the 1960s, books printed before 1501, and books with inscriptions. The club whose first publication was a law about who might own a press now counts a shelf of paperbacks as a collection. A paperback is not rare; what makes a shelf of them a collection is the person who chose them. Kane ends on the thought that such “analogue assets” will take on new meaning and value, and that a library full of the past might carry its readers into the future.
In Cleveland the Rowfant Club meets on Candlemas and lights a candle for each member. When a member dies, Cleveland Magazine reported in 2005, his candlestick is capped in a ceremony and set on the mantel beside those of the members who died before him. The two clubs were founded eight years apart, and they have given different answers to the question Grolier’s motto raises. The Grolier has widened what counts as a collection and who may propose a show. The Rowfant has kept its library, its candles and its rule about who may join. The woman who has handled every book in its library is still outside its membership. There is no candlestick for her.
Is a bibliophile society about the book, or was it always about the friends?
⁂
The occasion is Lauren Kane’s “Inside the Grolier Club, a book lover’s paradise in Manhattan,” published online October 26 in the November 2026 issue of Apollo, from which the Grolier Club of today is drawn. The Rowfant Club of 2025, Amy Dawson’s remarks and Russell H. Anderson’s 1955 history are quoted as reported in Katherine Churchill’s “The Exclusive Men’s-Only Rare Books Club, And The Woman Who Has A Key,” Defector, June 3, 2025; the club did not respond to her request for comment. The Caxton Club’s vote is from Dan Crawford’s history in the Caxtonian (August 2010) and the club’s own account of its first women members; James W. Ellsworth’s Bible and presidency are from Edward A. Quattrochi in the Caxtonian (June 2019). The Scheide Gutenberg’s owners are from Princeton University Library; the 1926 sale of the Melk copy is from Yale’s Beinecke Library. Charles W. Chesnutt’s “Baxter’s Procrustes” (1904) is public domain and is quoted from the text. The accounts of 1902 and 1910 are from the Charles W. Chesnutt Digital Archive, the Library of America and the Bibliographical Society of America; Helen Chesnutt is quoted as the Library of America quotes her. The candlesticks and the mantel are from Anne Trubek’s “The Book Boys,” Cleveland Magazine (2005), and from Freeman’s; the Philobiblon’s date is from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Quotations keep their sources’ spelling.
Also drawn on: the Grolier Club’s online exhibition entries for Robert Hoe and the Hroswitha Club’s records; the New International Encyclopædia on the Grolier Club; Princeton’s “Brayton Ives, collector”; Rare Book Hub on the Grolier’s founding; the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History on the Rowfant; and the Philobiblon Club’s meetings page.
Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; outside literary editing by Claude Fable 5.1. The header, the interior and the painting of the Grolier’s house were generated with Gemini Argon for this essay.