On Sunday 14th May the Signet Library paid host to a group of twenty delegates from New York’s Grolier Club. Founded in 1884 and with its own magnificent premises in the heart of the Big Apple, the Grolier Club is one of the most prestigious organisations in the book history world. Its library, exhibitions and publications are second to none and membership is seen as a recognition both of career achievement and personal contribution to bibliographic practice and knowledge. The Club has representatives worldwide, although its New York headquarters remains the focus of the Club’s activities.
The delegates were taken on a tour of the Signet Library’s halls and spaces before assembling in the Commissioners’ Room for an exhibition built around the life and career of the Signet Library’s own greatest bibliographer, John Philip Edmond (1850-1906 and Signet Librarian 1904-1906). Edmond was born and apprenticed into a family firm of Aberdeen bookbinders and printers. The family were religious – Edmond himself was an acolyte of the High Church Oxford Movement – and passionately interested in the history of their city. Over the course of the 1880s, Edmond researched and published a remarkable series of histories of the early Aberdeen printers, the pioneer of which, Edward Raban, arrived to set up his press in 1624.
Edmond’s research brought him into contact with James Lindsay, 5th Earl Crawford, whose family had built a vast private library at their Scottish seat at Balcarres. By the 1880s, that collection was largely dispersed and the family seat was at Haigh Hall near Wigan, where they had once again built a spectacular private library, rich in manuscripts and examples of early printing from Britain and the wider world. Despite the differences in their background, Edmond and Lindsay became close and committed friends, and in 1891 Edmond moved his family to Haigh to become Lindsay’s full time librarian. During his thirteen years there, Edmond would research and publish catalogues of spectacular quality and utility which were influential worldwide.
In 1890 Edmond and Dr. Robert Dickson co-produced the great Annals of Scottish Printing which rewrote the history of the first century of Scottish printing from the moment the Writer to the Signet Walter Chepman brought Scotland’s first press to Edinburgh in 1507 up to the moment that James VI left for London in 1603. The book remains the basis for all work on the subject since and copies are highly sought after.
In 1904 Edmond beat out a vast field of candidates to become the Signet Librarian in succession to the late Thomas Graves Law. Edmond would be at the Signet Library for only a short time before his tragic death in January 1906, but in that time he produced a fine new catalogue of the Library’s fifteenth century books (incunabula), and oversaw the move of books into the then-new West Wing extension.
Following his death, his wife donated the magnificent printing blocks from Annals of Scottish Printing to the Library, and these, accompanied by many examples of early printed Scottish books from the Signet Library’s collections, formed the core of the exhibition for the Grolier Club.
At the end of the visit, the delegates presented the Signet Library with a copy of the Grolier Club publication French Book Arts by H. George Fletcher.
