This month we had the pleasure to talk to Meghan Constantinou, who has been Librarian of the Grolier Club since 2011 and a club member since 2013. She holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of Delaware and a M.L.S. in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute. Her interests focus on the history of private collecting, women's book ownership, library catalogues, stenciled book production, and private printing before the private press movement. She can be found on Twitter, and she posts for the Grolier Club on Instagram and Facebook.
At what point did you want to become a librarian?
I have known for all of my adult life that I wanted to care for historic collections. After college, where I majored in studio art, I got a job cataloguing prints for an art gallery in Boston and never looked back. I thought my path would lead to museum curatorship, but once I entered my master’s program in Art History, I realized how much I missed books and prints. I also started to feel constricted by the hyper-specialization of academia and was concerned about dedicating so many years to a PhD with few curatorial job prospects at the end. I looked into rare book librarianship and knew immediately that it was what I wanted to do: it combined collections work with a strong ethic of service that felt important to me. I finished my M.A., entered an M.L.S. program, learned as much as I could about the field, and was very fortunate to get my job at the Grolier Club shortly afterwards. The fact that I have been able to translate my passion for historic collections into a career is one of the great blessings in my life. I have worked hard, but I have also been privileged with the opportunities and support that make it possible to pursue this field.
What has been your most exciting discovery?
Discovery takes so many forms in this profession. Of course after ten years as the Grolier Club Librarian, I have my classic ‘discovery in the basement’ story. In 2018, I was packing up the archives for an impending renovation and found, among other treasures, a box of Thomas Wise forgeries and a box of twenty uncatalogued Daniel Press publications that had been donated in 1939, including two pieces from the elusive Frome period. These now form the core of an exhibition on the Daniel Press that I am curating at the Grolier Club, on view December 2, 2021-February 12, 2022.
There are also, as Katie Birkwood and Liam Sims mentioned, the everyday small discoveries—in between the covers of books, in old archival folders, and in conversations with Grolier Club members—all of which deepen and enrich the objects’ stories. My Assistant Librarian, Barbara Bieck (now Special Collections Librarian at the New York Society Library), once found a ca. 1927 memo in the archives by our former Librarian, Ruth Shepard Granniss, attempting to establish dedicated ‘not-to-be-disturbed’ morning hours. A brilliant concept but doomed to failure at the Grolier Club!
Finally, for me, there has also been a significant element of self-discovery. After my first decade in the profession, I have begun to find my voice, to understand my values better, and to see more clearly the power structures that have shaped both the field and my own experience of it.
Tell us a little bit about your latest project.
For the last five years—mostly on nights and weekends—I have been working with my friend, fellow club member, and consummate antiquarian bookseller, Jonathan A. Hill, on a catalogue of the pre-1830 private library catalogues in the Grolier Club Library. These are catalogues of libraries—both print and manuscript—that were produced by or for a living owner to manage the collection, promote the owner’s wealth and cultural sophistication, serve as a reference work, or sometimes advertise the collection for sale. As a genre, they aren’t well covered in bibliographical reference literature, but they capture a lot of fugitive information about library history and are wonderfully (and problematically) human. They have given me a lot to think about as I continue to develop my interests in the history of private collecting.
What exciting plans are in the pipeline?
The Grolier Club is going through a period of growth right now, and I am excited to see the direction it takes. We are thinking more about the role of digital technology, reaching out to new audiences, and we have received important major donations like the Ken Rendell Collection on the Detection of Forged Handwriting, recently augmented by the Rendells’ gift of the infamous Oath of a Freeman forgery.
On a personal level, I am excited about my upcoming exhibition on the Daniel Press (my first solo-curated show), the continued development of my work on private library catalogues, and the opportunity to explore one group of catalogues in more depth. I was honoured this year with the Fredson Bowers Award, a Major Grant from the Bibliographical Society and the Bibliographical Society of America, to explore the library of the Elliot family of Minto in the Scottish Borders, for which we have eight manuscript catalogues dating between 1738 and 1938.
Do you collect yourself?
I have a collection of about 250 women’s bookplates that I add to on a regular basis. (My eventual plan is to donate them to the Grolier Club.) I don’t have a systematic plan: I buy the ones that speak to me visually: the style of the artwork, the quality of the execution, the iconography (domestic interiors are a favourite), interesting annotations, etc. I buy early ones and modern ones as long as they grab my eye. As a librarian, it is so refreshing to be anti-methodical about something. My collection also supports my dedication to documenting women book owners.
If money were no object what book/manuscript would you like to add to your library?
This question has caused me so much anguish: there are too many possibilities! There are real things that are unobtainable (one of the Little Gidding Harmonies); there are fantasy objects (a time-machine back to the late 1990s/early 2000s with an army of staff to print out data from nascent auction and booksellers’ websites); and collective things (a large cache of primary resources documenting the rich history of Black American private book collecting, which is almost completely absent from the Grolier Club Library).
However, if I could only add one book to the collection that is, in theory, still obtainable on the market, it would be a magnificent stenciled choir book (by which I mean the text, or a significant part of it, has been produced by stenciling). Several years ago, I found an 18thc French stenciled library catalogue in the Grolier Club’s collection, which is absolutely fascinating, but a bit of an outlier. Most stenciled books from this period (mid-17th to late 19thc) are large liturgical books produced with stenciled text, musical notation, and sometimes decoration, often in multiple colors. I have done a lot of research on stenciled books for an article that is currently in press, and it would be nice to have a spectacularly beautiful, and more representative, example for the Grolier Club Library.
A copy of the Daniel Press Garland of Rachel would be nice too. Ok, I’m done.
What is the greatest challenge facing rare book librarians in the next few years?
Rare book librarians need to grapple with a legacy within our profession and our institutions that has privileged whiteness and the upholding of culturally dominant power structures. Almost all of us have inherited this legacy whether it is comfortable to admit or not. If we cannot find ways to make our collections speak in a changing, increasingly globalized world, to relate them to contemporary social and cultural issues, rare book libraries—particularly those with strong educational mandates—will eventually shrink and fossilize.
Has the pandemic brought some positives for librarians as well as negatives?
Every rare book librarian I know has benefited from the opportunity to explore digital technology as a means of sharing their collections. This is embarrassing to admit, but I had no idea how uninformative the library section of our website was until I was forced to rely on it as a main communication tool. The pandemic has also improved my ability to provide instruction. I have just begun offering a virtual library orientation for our members on a monthly basis, which would have presented several difficulties in a physical environment. During the lockdown, I also enjoyed sharing more of our collections via social media (Instagram, Facebook) and our library blog. This points to a significant challenge ahead as our libraries begin to reopen: how do we balance these new skills and services against the work we were doing before, often with reduced staff? How do we manage the expectations of ourselves and our patrons in this new environment?