This recent exhibition measures Jane Austen’s growing fame at fifty-year intervals: ending in 1825, 1875, 1925, 1975, and 2025. In the bibliographical tradition of The Grolier Club, the curators constructed a timeline for Jane Austen using books and paper collectables. The result surprised visitors as much: rare first editions and manuscripts mix irreverently with popular reprintings, giveaways, movie posters, illustrations, theater playbills, and all manner of paper ephemera. This kaleidoscopic mix reflects Jane Austen’s heady reputation as a revered canonical author whose books simultaneously appeal as accessible, engaging fiction—studied in schools while also enjoyed as “chick lit.”
Mary Crawford was the co-curator of the Grolier Club exhibition Paper Jane: 250 Years of Austen, which ran from December 4 th through Valentine’s Day of 2026. She first read Jane Austen’s novels during college and began collecting works by and about Austen in 1980, shortly after marrying into a devoted, multi-generational book-collecting family.
Mary is a Life Member of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) and a 20-year member of the Grolier Club of New York, where she currently serves as Treasurer and sits on the Executive Council. Paper Jane is Mary’s second exhibition; in 2010, she curated bi-coastal exhibitions related to the 20th-century British writer Mary Webb at the Grolier Club and Stanford University Libraries. Mary and her husband, Bruce, co-authored the two-volume Mary Webb: Neglected Genius, which was published to coincide with those exhibitions.
Mary recently retired as Senior Vice President from Morgan Stanley, where she founded the Crawford-Hogan-Wang Group, a financial planning and portfolio management team serving Silicon Valley families.
This meeting is online only. A link will be sent to members and guests on the day of the meeting.