Last summer I attended Rare Book School at Princeton, which is about the tweediest thing a person can do. One humid day, after a morning spent squinting at Gutenberg Bibles, I sipped a coffee with Amy Dawson, a lifelong librarian and cataloguer with decades of experience in rare books. Dawson has a careful, thoughtful demeanor, shoulder-length blonde curly hair, and a quick laugh. She also moonlights as a library consultant for the Rowfant Club, a rare books club for men in Cleveland, founded in 1892. Women may visit the club as guests, work in its library, or attend its lectures on Wednesday evenings and Friday lunchtime—but cannot become members. I was immediately intrigued.
I have an attraction-repulsion thing for men’s-only institutions. I attended Bowdoin College, a school that didn’t go fully co-ed until 1971. Now I collect books about my alma mater written before 1950, when I would not have been allowed to attend. In my early 20s, I briefly worked as a personal assistant for a nonagenarian retired banker on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was lovely, tipped generously, and liked his sheets ironed every day. When I wasn’t ordering him corduroy pants, I would make his dinner reservations at the Union Club, where only men can become members. The policy annoyed him, because he was looking for a girlfriend.
If you’re not up to your eyeballs in first editions, it may surprise you to learn that rare books clubs like the Rowfant exist at all. But there’s a slew of them: the Grolier Club in New York City, the Caxton Club in Chicago, the Philobiblon Club in Philadelphia, the Northern Ohio Bibliophilic Society, and so on. These clubs organize and network the rare books trade, which is heavily based on relationships, and create occasions for book collectors and bibliophiles to mingle. It’s not all commerce: Members commune to celebrate books as artforms, cooing over elegant fonts, admiring marbled paper, and applauding all the craftsmanship that went into making beautiful volumes. At the Rowfant, a regular speaker series draws both amateur bibliophiles and rare books professionals. “A great intellectual environment,” is how it was described to me.
When I later spoke with Dawson over the phone, she gushed about her work. “I love everything about this job,” she said, and compared her passion for books to a love of golf. “This is my sport.”
For a cataloguer like Dawson, who drafts detailed descriptions of rare and out-of-print books so they can be findable to readers and researchers, the Rowfant’s library was paradise. It was “untouched ground, in a way,” she said, full of volumes that couldn’t be found anywhere else, often with interesting notes and bookmarks left by readers long past. Cataloguers quickly become experts in their collections. “Somebody will come in and say, ‘Oh, I think we have this,’ or ‘Do we have it?’ or maybe they want to buy it, and I can usually tell you right off the top of my head whether the Rowfant Club owns it or not,” Dawson said. The Rowfant’s library, she said, includes about 11,000 items—and she has touched every single one.
Dawson also enjoys working at the club itself, an 1838 neoclassical brick home that’s located in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood and full of antique decorations. Groundhogs, the club’s mascot, feature abundantly in the decor, from stained glass to taxidermy. There are hundreds of candlesticks in the club, and one for each member is lit every year during an annual meeting on Candlemas. The candlesticks’ design includes—you guessed it—a groundhog. When she started the job in 2020, Dawson saw the Rowfant as a refuge during the chaos of COVID. Amid all the old-fashioned charm and, yes, the groundhogs, she found a place to “just be in the quiet of this beautiful historic building and spend time with these amazing books.” She’s also always fully aware that she can’t become a member of the club whose library she knows best.
American bibliophilic societies date back to the Gilded Age and have long been important for the rare books landscape. “The value of book collecting and book collectors,” Sam Lemley, curator of special collections at Carnegie Mellon University, told me, “is huge, because they are the caretakers of the past.” Research collections and public libraries often depend on donations from private collectors. Clubs like Rowfant play an important role in “enriching and nourishing” the rare books community, as the bookseller Rebecca Romney described in an email, by “connecting specialists, providing support for exhibitions and other projects, spreading word of events, offering a landing place for newcomers.”
More holistically, they create occasions to connect over niche interests, which as the book historian Kate Ozment put it, is “one of the most human things.”
Most rare books clubs historically only allowed men to join, some good old-fashioned sexism in the world of intellectual pursuits. A 1955 history of the Rowfant Club calls its all-male membership policy “one of the firmest” of its traditions. In the early days of the club, women did attend as guests, but by the ‘50s, their presence had dwindled. Still, Rowfant members would have “hotly denied” that the exclusion of women “arose either from jealousy or from any contempt for women’s knowledge,” the author Russell H. Anderson wrote. Instead he speculated that “the dread of napkins and mould salad at the evening snack may have played a part” in the membership policy.
When I spoke with Ozment over the phone, she expressed sharp criticism of the Rowfant’s membership policy. But she also reminded me that the policies of an organization do not always reflect the beliefs of its individual members. During her research for her 2023 book The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors, she came across accounts of members of the Grolier Club—a men’s-only club until 1976—petitioning for more inclusion of women all the way back to 1902. Mid-century men’s book clubs, she suggested, may have provided a reprieve from the pressures of heterosexual life and the strictures of masculinity at a time when queer identities and intimacy between men would not have been acceptable in the mainstream.
“It’s not an untrue characterization to be like, Well, this was a sexist organization, because it was—it was structurally sexist,” Ozment said. But also, “I think a lot of it’s just inertia. It’s the kind of subtle and casual sexism where it’s like, you don’t get up in the morning and think you hate women, but you’re just very comfortable with the fact that women aren’t in your spaces.”
Of course, women have always been in rare books spaces, even when they tended to be excluded from full enfranchisement. Amy Dawson has her antecedents; Ruth Granniss served as the librarian for the Grolier from 1906 to 1944, and Rosamond B. Loring as the librarian for Boston’s Club of Odd Volumes from 1936 to 1949. Before she became the librarian for the Morgan Library, Belle da Costa Greene worked at Princeton when only men could enroll. Women also made spaces of their own, starting collecting clubs like the Hroswitha in New York City, which was active from 1944 to 2004. The bookbinder Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt was a founding member of Hroswitha, and also co-founded the co-ed Pittsburgh Bibliophiles.
Like so many other industries, the rare books world has been catching up on gender equity, if slowly and fitfully. Many women now hold leadership roles in the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies. Romney, who also serves as a board member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, wrote that while “women as a whole have received more recognition for their contributions across the rare book world in the past twenty years,” she believes there is “still room for improvement.” She noted that according to the ABAA’s 2025 membership directory, less than 20 percent of the association’s members are women, even though women hold six of 14 slots on its Board of Governors.
As the New York Times has reported, collecting on the whole has been getting a bit of a refresh. “Our culture around collecting has changed,” Lemley told me. “It’s so much more diverse. People are collecting weirder things.” Lemley is part of the Grolier Club, which has steep annual membership fees, but he’s also part of an effort to revive the Pittsburgh Bibliophiles with the hopes of making it a more accessible institution. He imagined that membership fees might eventually top out around $20. “It’s very much about taking this tradition, which I think is really wonderful—this idea that book collectors get together and then share what they’re collecting, trade tips, trade stories of triumphs and failures—but making it much less country club.”
Amid these shifts, the Rowfant has been especially resistant to change. Women do now regularly attend meetings as guests, but it’s one of only two rare book clubs in the United States that still exclude women from membership, together with the Club of Odd Volumes. Neither club participates any longer in the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies, of which the Rowfant was a founding member. It’s not entirely clear whether their exclusionary policies led to the divorce, but it’s also not hard to read between the lines. Sometime in 2022, the edit history of the Wikipedia page for FABS indicates that text was added to declare that the Rowfant and the Club of Odd Volume were no longer members. The Rowfant did not respond to request for comment on this story, and the former president of FABS, Jennifer Larson, declined to be interviewed. Larson commented in an email, however, that, “The Rowfant Club played an important role in the founding of FABS,” and “their separation from FABS was by mutual agreement (that is, they were not ‘kicked out’).”
“I hope,” she added, “that one day they will change their minds about their membership policy.”
When I asked Amy Dawson if there was anything she didn’t like about working at the Rowfant, she admitted that she was sometimes “tweaked by” the club’s gender dynamics. “I think I would be a wonderful Rowfant member,” she said.
She enjoys the conversations she has with other members while working together on the club’s exhibits, the casual and appreciative way they would discuss beautiful bindings or fine press books. “I feel like when I’m at the Rowfant Club, I’ve met my tribe,” she told me. But it was funny, she remarked, that the people she felt so understood by were all of a different gender. She wondered if perhaps they didn’t see her in quite the same way she saw them.
Still, as Dawson reminded me, even ostensibly inclusive spaces in the book world are not always hospitable to women. Prior to her current roles at Cuyahoga Community College and Peter Keisogloff Rare Books, where she is vice president and manager of the Brecksville Office, she worked in special collections at the Cleveland Public Library. There, the books belong to the people of Cleveland. "Any member of the community can walk in and look at an Audubon folio,” Dawson told me, “That is pretty powerful.” But in recent years, the CPL had shifted its focus away from research materials and special collections, Dawson’s area of expertise, and toward public programming. Safety and security issues had become more prevalent for the women working and researching there, part of a larger pattern of violence at libraries. “In a way, there are constraints for access as well, when you’re worried about safety, Dawson said. The Rowfant, on the other hand, was a place she felt safe, and that her work was valued.
When I asked her if she saw any benefit to the men’s-only membership policy, Dawson hesitated. “It’s hard for me to say, because I would like to be a member of the Rowfant Club, because I do enjoy being at the club and talking to the members,” she reiterated. Still, she said the club members had been “very supportive” of her involvement and her work. “I have all the benefits of a member right now, because I can look at the beautiful books and I can attend lunches if I want to. The members have been very generous,” she told me.
She explained that members can buy dinner tickets for their guests to attend. “Sometimes I come in and members just—they want to hand them to me.” Dawson said. “Multiple members will say, you know, 'You can be my guest at any time.'”
When I asked why the Rowfant has retained its member policy, Dawson suggested it may have been in part to stay exclusive, and in part out of respect for club tradition. “Traditionally it’s been all male. You know, this is the tradition, this is how they started.”
A source familiar with the Rowfant’s operation commented in a similar vein: “It is the way it is because that’s how it was formed. It’s a men’s bibliophilic society and it just has remained that to this day.” This policy, they acknowledged, excludes “people who could be great members.” While the source conceded that it was possible things might change one day, for now they “don’t have any reason to believe it’s going to go in a different direction.”
After I got off the phone with Dawson, I spent some time browsing my collection of Bowdoin books. I have a cookbook by an alumnus, early histories of the college on fine paper, one fragile 19th-century songbook. I have always intended to find a way to include more women authors in my collection, but the parameters I’d set—books published before 1950—make that difficult, and I’ve found myself reluctant to change my vision. My one exception is a novel by Sarah Orne Jewett, who received a Bowdoin honorary degree. Picking up that signed copy of The Country of the Pointed Firs, I felt a flash of embarrassment. How strange it is that old habits stay with us, how strange and at times troublesome, their capacity to endure.
