McKay, Oona2024-02-082024-02-08http://hdl.handle.net/11603/31577In “Archeology of Text (VMC341, Spring 2022), Oona McKay followed her skeptical curiosity about rare book collections and collectors by designing a final research project using the Carol Zeman Rothkopf Grolier Club Collection. I nominated this paper because Oona’s investigation combined the course’s teachings about early print and manuscript books with an analytical method that represented the strengths of Goucher’s curriculum, historically and politically aware, and sensitive in its analysis of cultural codes. The Grolier Club, founded in 1884, is currently housed in a grand building on East 60th Street in New York City. Its members are some of the most wealthy and knowledgeable book collectors in the world, and the exhibition catalogues Rothkopf collected showcase the club’s most treasured objects, with framing narratives that cast them as glamorous and altogether desirable possessions. Oona’s analysis of these narratives revealed awkward truths about the extraordinary values attached to rare books, even in fragments, and the potential contradictions inherent in collectors’ claims to be performing an important cultural service by acquiring them. –Arnold Sanders, Emeritus Professor of LiteratureNot For What They Contained: The Myth-Building of the New York Grolier Club was written in the spring of 2022 as a final paper for Arnie Saunder’s Archeology of The Text. In the class, we were encouraged to make use of Goucher’s archives and special collections, conducting close readings of these rare books as art objects as well as texts. I chose to make a study of the recently acquired Carol Zeman Rothkopf Grolier Club Collection. The collection, donated by Ms. Rothkopf, contains a number of publications by an antiquarian book collecting society in Manhattan. Reading into the choices made in a few selected publications, I hoped to understand how the members of this club were imagining and defining the act of book collection, as well as the social implications of that shared understanding. By engaging with a broader community of bibliophiles, and perpetuating that community’s collectively cultivated understanding of the function and merit of collection, the Grolier club creates a division between an in-group of true appreciators and an often unmentioned out-group who simply do not need or have use for access to the knowledge rare books contain.10 pagesen-USCollection may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain information or permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the Goucher Special Collections & Archives at 410-337-6347 or email archives@goucher.edu.Research -- Periodicals.Text