Foxes and Folios

"There is a natural affinity between sport and book collecting. . . . The joys of the chase and the exultation in achievement after an arduous hunt, whether of fox, pheasant or folio, have much in common." Thus graciously the Grolier Club last week mixed foxes and folios in an exhibit of members' sporting books and prints in its Manhattan clubhouse. Within its print-hung, paneled walls, smelling of old leather bindings and armchairs, the Grolier is a club of booklovers more interested in a richly tooled cover than in a succulent footnote or limpid trochee. It was founded in 1884 by craftsmen and wealthy collectors to improve the then wretched state of U. S. bookmaking. Its name commemorates a great 16th-Century connoisseur of covers & colophons, Jean Grolier de Servier. Viscount d'Aguisy.

To breed better books the club itself has whelped 97 masterfully made volumes on bookmaking and bibliography, has built the best reference collection on the subject in the U. S. Its dim library of some 27,000 books-about-books. guarded by busts of Ben Franklin and other great printers, is open to the public. At monthly meetings members shoptalk of first editions and Renaissance engravings, entertain each other with addresses on "Pope as a Letter Writer," "Benjamin Franklin, Traveller," "The Terrible Gustave Dore." Members include Moneymen J. Pierpont Morgan, Owen D. Young, Baron Victor Rothschild, Typographers Frederic Goudy, Bruce Rogers, Publishers Charles Scribner, Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Physician Logan Clendening, Actor Robert Montgomery, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (honorary).

President of the Grolier Club is tall, forthright, weathered Harry Twyford Peters, who "works for a living" as a coal merchant, but whose real business is more varied. He is 1) co-Master of the Meadow Brook Hounds, one of the foremost U. S. hunt clubs; 2) leading U. S. authority on fox hunting, author of Just Hunting (1936); 3) inspirer of the national enthusiasm for Currier & Ives, owner of some 15,000 of their prints, author of four scholarly tomes on antique U. S. lithographs; 4) owner of perhaps the world's best private library of sporting books and prints; 5) promoter of a unique theory: art is more indebted to sport than to religion. Sportsman-Bibliophile Peters has lectured on his thesis at Manhattan's great Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Grolier Club's new show, he thinks, bears him out too. He sweeps an arm about the array of sporting books, which date neatly from 1340 to 1940, points out that many a lustrous treatise on hawking, angling, hunting was written in the shadow of the Church. The first printed English sporting book, the Book of St. Albans, was written presumably by an abbess. "The greatest hunting manuscript in existence." the brilliantly illuminated 15th-Century Le Lime de la Chasse of Gaston Phebus, observes: "There is no man's life less displeasurable to God than the life of a perfect, skillful hunter. . . . Hunting causeth a man to eschew the seven deadly sins. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.