The Bibliophile Jean Grolier (1479-1565)

Born in Lyon, Jean Grolier (c. 1490-1565) became Treasurer of Milan during the French occupation of the city in the Italian Wars.  It was in this period that he met Aldus Manutius and began to assemble his notable collection of books. Grolier’s collection continued to grow once back in France, where he rose to become Treasurer too. His reputation today rests on the luxurious bindings he commissioned for his books.  These three volumes were all bound in Paris: the first, a copy of Poliziano’s complete works, was produced by the workshop of the so-called ‘last Grolier binder’, c. 1559-65; the second, of Erasmus's Annotations on the New Testament, by Jean Picard, c. 1540-47.  The remarkable gold-tooled architectural decoration of the third (Jean Tagault's Five Books on the Principles of Surgery), is also by Picard, after 1543.  Like most Grolier books, these all bear on the cover the inscription ‘IO. GROLIERII ET AMICORVM’, ‘[belonging to] Jean Grolier and his friends’ – a statement of the role of books and collections in humanist and elite sociability. The Reliures BNF site offers access to over fifty Grolier bindings from the National Library of France.

Credit: Oren Margolis (July 2018)