The Grolier Club Tour of Italy

RICHARD BROWN BAKER
 

^ OMMUNICATING the pleasures of travel is never
easy. The tastes, smells, sights emanating from for¬
eign roads, buildings and rivers have left such a
deposit on one's own imagination that it is hard to believe that
simple words will not convey them to others.

The members of the Grolier Club and their ladies who visited
Italy last May reveled in their experiences. My duty, I realize, is
to make the readers of Columbia Library Coluvms envious. Any¬
thing less would fall short of our consensus.

We Groliers saw rarities; we ate and drank in splendor; and
our egos were flattered by the conviction that we were considered
to be a group of superior importance.

The reader may gag at this acknowledgment of pride. Venice,
Florence, and Rome are visited by so many, however, that an
account of our three weeks in Italy is superfluous unless the
special privileges bestowed on us are stressed.

Each time we debouched from our chartered blue buses near
the entrance to an ancient library, we no doubt resembled other
busloads of American tourists, guidebooks and cameras on the
ready.

But the student of social organisms, observing us in the charac¬
teristic activity of chmbing stairs—doubly rare would be a rare
book in Italy not preserved above a Himalaya of steps—would
perceive our differentness if he focused on the mid-May afternoon
when we ascended the Great Staircase of the Palazzo Vecchio in
Florence.

By this time we had group experience. We were veterans of
the Ambrosiana, the Brera (to be precise, la Biblioteca Braidense),
the Trivulziana, the Laurenziana; in the latter's dim light we had
 

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