Grolier Club appoints Declan Kiely as Managing Director

Declan Kiely will be the new executive director of the Grolier Club, America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and lovers of the graphic arts. He will take office on July 22.

“Declan is committed to honoring the Grolier Club’s monumental legacy and will help carry on our vision,” said Nancy K. Boehm, president of the Grolier Club. “In our worldwide search, we were thrilled to find such a remarkable candidate with deep academic knowledge and expertise who also knows the Club on a personal level.”

Kiely was selected after a seven-month search by a committee led by Boehm and the Grolier Club board of directors.

“The Grolier Club’s wide-ranging exhibitions, publications, programs, and world-class library have profoundly shaped my work as a library professional,” Kiely said. “I look forward to working with the Club’s highly talented and dedicated staff and its remarkable council to expand public engagement. I am committed to preserving and enhancing the Club’s rich legacy as a public educational institution while looking firmly toward future opportunities and the Club’s upcoming 150th anniversary in 2034.”

Prior to joining the Grolier Club, Kiely served as Director of Special Collections and Exhibitions at the New York Public Library from 2017 to 2024. Previously, he was the Robert H. Taylor Curator and Head of the Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum from 2007 to 2017 and a Specialist in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library from 2003 to 2007.

At the New York Public Library, Kiely opened the library’s first permanent exhibition, the Polonsky exhibition of the Treasures of the New York Public Library, and co-curated the JD Salinger exhibition with the author’s son in 2019. He also oversaw the extraordinary growth of the library’s archival collections, including the acquisition of the papers of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, the archives of Renate Adler, Vivian Gornick, and Lucy Sante, and notable acquisitions of photographs, rare books, manuscripts, letters, and realia.

During his time at the Morgan Library & Museum, Kiely organized major exhibitions on Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain. His 2015 exhibition Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars traveled to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, and Henry James and American Art (co-curated with Irish writer Colm Tóibín in 2017) was also shown at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.