On February 24, Bard Graduate Center students and faculty were given a private tour of the exhibition For Art’s Sake: The Aesthetic Movement in Print and Beyond at the Grolier Club, which specializes in the history of book collecting and bibliography, led by its director Eric Holzenberg.

On this occasion, Mr. Holzenberg’s role was somewhat more personal, since the 130 books and prints on display were drawn from his own private collection. Focusing primarily on the Aesthetic Movement in Britain and the United States, this was, in effect, a survey of the published literature on design during the high Victorian period (c. 1860 to 1890). Many of the movement’s key designers were represented, notably Christopher Dresser, Bruce Talbert, and James McNeill Whistler, but there was also a range of trade catalogues and manuals of household taste, such as the classic books Hints on Household Taste by Charles Locke Eastlake and The House Beautiful by Clarence Cook. Aestheticism loosened many of the traditional hierarchies in design practice, so it was heartening to see so many women writers represented, including works by Rhoda and Agnes Garrett, Mrs. Haweis, Mrs. Orrinsmith, and Harriet Spofford, as well as a small selection of those “little aesthetic bombs” in the nursery created by Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway.

Because illustrated books were the key agents of design discourse in the Victorian period, this was a rare opportunity to see at first hand many of the engraved and chromo-lithographed images that are so often reproduced in lectures and history books.