{"id":1626,"date":"2020-08-18T16:12:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-18T16:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=1626"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:21:37","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:21:37","slug":"carol-porter-grossman-the-history-of-the-limited-editions-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2020\/08\/18\/carol-porter-grossman-the-history-of-the-limited-editions-club\/","title":{"rendered":"Carol Porter Grossman, The History of the Limited Editions Club<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Carol Porter Grossman, The History of the Limited Editions Club<\/em><\/h1>\n\n
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Jeremy B. Dibbell<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Cover<\/a><\/svg><\/span><\/a><\/div><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Carol Porter Grossman. The History of the Limited Editions Club. <\/em>New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2017. xi, 268 p. ill. ISBN 978-1-58456-3655. US$125.00.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Every publisher deserves a historian like Carol Porter\nGrossman. This absorbing book recounts the remarkable story of the Limited\nEditions Club (LEC) and its offshoots, as well as that of the Club\u2019s\nindefatigable and imaginative founder, George Macy, and those who kept the LEC\ngoing after his untimely death in 1956. Drawing on extensive archives at the Harry\nRansom Center, Columbia University, the Newberry Library, and the Grolier Club,\nas well as private archives and several important oral histories, Grossman is\nable to reconstruct in great and fascinating detail the eight decades of fine\nbook production by the LEC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

George Macy envisioned the Limited Editions Club as a subscription service which would ship a fine-press book\u2014expertly designed, printed, and illustrated\u2014each month to 1,500 subscribers. Announced in the spring of 1929, with the first title shipped later that year in the same week as the crash of the U.S. stock market, it took a serious feat of ingenuity plus a good measure of sheer bloodymindedness to keep the LEC going through years of economic depression and war. Macy was up to the task, and Grossman ably chronicles his unceasing efforts to promote and advertise the Club, and documents the extremely complex and far-flung logistics involved in the production of LEC titles\u2014all without the benefits of email, of course!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As if the Limited Editions Club weren\u2019t enough for Macy, he\nalso undertook various side ventures and special projects, treated by Grossman\nin her sixth chapter. Among these were the Heritage Press and Heritage Club,\nthe Nonesuch Dickens, the Bruce Rogers Shakespeare, and the Readers Club, which\noffered inexpensive reprints of books unfairly ignored when they were\noriginally published. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following George Macy\u2019s death from kidney cancer, his wife\nHelen undertook management of the LEC until her retirement in 1971, when the\nClub was sold to the Communications Research Machines division of Boise\nCascade. It was sold again in late 1972 to Cardavon Press, and once more to\nlongtime Club members Francis Decker and Paul M. Poster in 1978. To their great\ncredit, they brought in financier Sidney Shiff, who took over the Club\u2019s\noperations and shifted the business model over the course of the 1980s toward\nthe production of more limited (and more expensive) fine books and livres\nd\u2019artistes<\/em>, carrying on Macy\u2019s tradition of creating exceptional books to\nvery high standards. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fittingly, the volume itself is a beautiful one. Jerry\nKelly\u2019s design skills are on full display, and the text is set in Matthew\nCarter\u2019s Galliard types, first used in the 1979 LEC edition of The Lyrical\nPoems of Fran\u00e7ois Villon<\/em>. More than ninety full-color illustrations are\nexcellently integrated into the design. My only quibble\u2014and it is exceedingly\nminor indeed\u2014is the treatment of the 1,255 thorough and very useful notes,\nwhich are given at the end of each chapter but numbered continuously: by the\nfinal chapter the four-digit superscripted endnote indicators get to be a bit\nobtrusive. Restarting the numbering for each chapter would have obviated this\ntiniest of infelicities, but no real matter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grossman\u2019s book, sure to stand as the definitive history of\nthe Limited Editions Club, would do George Macy proud. It deserves a place on\nthe shelves of all bibliophiles with an interest in twentieth-century\npublishing history and fine book production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeremy B. Dibbell, Rare Book School<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every publisher deserves a historian like Carol Porter Grossman. This absorbing book recounts the remarkable story of the Limited Editions Club (LEC) and its offshoots, as well as that of the Club\u2019s indefatigable and imaginative founder, George Macy, and those who kept the LEC going after his untimely death in 1956. Drawing on extensive archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Columbia University, the Newberry Library, and the Grolier Club, as well as private archives and several important oral histories, Grossman is able to reconstruct in great and fascinating detail the eight decades of fine book production by the LEC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1627,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1897,1942,1953],"class_list":["post-1626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-20th-century","tag-north-america","tag-publishing"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1626"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5693,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626\/revisions\/5693"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}