The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors

The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors
by Kate Ozment

Cambridge University Press., Cambridge, England, 2023
Elements in Publishing and Book Culture series
100 pp. Paper, €14.58
ISBN: 9781009257206..

Reviewed by: 
Jan Baetens
October 2024

The changes in the field of book history have become the perfect mirror of the changes in culture at large, at least in the Western world, the world on which focuses this excellent new volume in the Elements “Publishing and Book Culture” series. Book history is no longer a purely academic discipline: there is now room for nonacademic voices and insights (booksellers, antiquarians, auctioneers, collectors, and other booklovers), a happy return to the origins of what we call today “rare books” before its study became institutionalized as an academic discipline. What has also changed is the longtime gendered approach to the domain of rare and precious books: book history has always tended to ignore women, first because of the general identification of science with men, second because of the particular difficulty for women to have access to the special room that contained these special books, either the home library or the university reading room (two typically male spaces). And third but certainly not last: all books are now taken seriously, the distinction between books for men (the really precious ones) and books for women (novels, gardening, cooking, etc.) has ceased to exist; all genres and formats can now be of interest for all kinds of readers, be they simple booklovers or old-fashioned cognoscenti.

If the collecting and study of books and everything that surrounds it can thus no longer be seen as the exclusive domain of male and generally wealthy scientists or collectors, one of the major drivers of this revolution, which also impacts the type of books under scrutiny and the type of questions that are being asked, is undoubtedly the opening of the field to women librarians, bibliographers, teachers and collectors (in practice, there is often a strong overlap between these various functions).

Kate Ozment’s feminist and intersectionalist study of the New York Hroswitha Club analyzes a strangely – but shouldn’t one say shockingly? – overlooked chapter of these crucial transformations. Founded in 1944, the Club was started as the female double of the well-known and highly elite Grolier Club, a private club and society of bibliophiles in New York (several members of the Hroswitha Club were spouses or sisters of Grolier members, without however having the chance to seriously participate in the activities of the longtime all-male Grolier society). The status of the Hroswitha members, a very small group in the beginning, a rather large group of 40 to 50 members later on, was ambivalent. All the of them were highly competent specialists in the field of rare book collecting and studying, be it as private collectors (often in partnership with their husband) or as professionals (generally as librarians or bibliographers), yet not of them was allowed to enter the inner circle of academics and professionals setting the rules and agendas of bibliophilia and book history. The reasons of this exclusion were brutal. They were not social or scientific: many Hroswitha members were wealthy, sometimes even very wealthy, and all of them were perfectly knowledgeable in the field of rare and precious books. The exclusion was purely based on their gender. Ozment gives the tragic example of a female collector who donated an important collection to the Grolier Club while not even being allowed to be present at the donation ceremony! The Hroswitha Club and the network that supported it gave these women the opportunity not only to share and deepen their knowledge, but also to resist to social barriers imposed on their gender. The Club gave legitimacy to their unique and often ground-breaking work, which progressively ceased to be discarded as a gentle hobby, while serving also as a springboard for claiming new opportunities outside the sphere of the home and child-rearing.

The Hroswitha Club was a success story, which did not end with its gradual merger with the Grolier Club (today, only the Grolier Club is active). However, the real success of the Hroswitha Club lies elsewhere: first in the access of women to the profession, all women (not only the privileged members of the Club) and at all levels (not only as secretaries or anonymous bibliographers), second in the redefinition of what rare and precious books and book history really are, since some of the bibliographical and other tools and models developed by the Club members are still in use (and not only to describe books that had been excluded from the narrow field of expensive rare and old books).

Kate Ozment opens her inquiry with a telling anecdote: “This project began in March 2019 when a Wikipedia editor marked the Hroswitha Club page for deletion because the group was not significant enough” (p. 1). One should highlight here the date: “2019”, a painful reminder of the persistence of gender prejudices in the spheres of knowledge management. The Wikipedia menace (by the way, it is a pleasure to notice that the Hroswitha page is alive and kicking) encouraged Kate Ozment to travel to the New York archives, where amazing personal and collective stories were waiting to be disclosed. Those of the club and its multiple social and scientific activities, but also those of the individual club members, to whom the author pays a much-deserved personal tribute (Ozment has tried to write a short biographical notice for as many as possible of them, without making a priori distinctions between “important” and “less important” members).

In short, The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors is an elegantly written study that may serve as a model to similar research in a field whose historical and cultural importance is largely acknowledged but not always studies through modern lenses.