Exhibition at the Grolier Club

An exhibition at Manhattan's august Grolier Club, the private club of bibliophiles, may be of interest to readers of this blog. It's called Teaching America to Draw: Instructional Manuals & Ephemera, 1794 to 1925, and is open to the public through July 29. According to the Grolier web site, the exhibition

presents an in-depth survey of drawing manuals, drawing cards, lithographs, copybooks, and other ephemera, curated by Albert A. Anderson, Jr., emeritus professor of Art Education at The Pennsylvania State University, and William L. Joyce and Sandra K. Stelts of The Pennsylvania State University Libraries. These wonderfully evocative books, which are seldom seen by scholars and educators, much less by contemporary Americans, were instructional in nature and widely used, often to the point of destruction. As a result, relatively few remain today; those that do are scarce, sometimes rare, highly collectible, and typically heavily worn. The exhibition provides a rare opportunity to view the full range of this seldom-seen genre. The images themselves constitute an extraordinary window into nineteenth-century American culture.

An added bonus of visiting this show is the chance to see the clubhouse at 47 East 60th Street, a 1917 building designed by the great Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue.

If any of you go to see it, leave a comment saying what you thought of it.