Austin, Gabriel

Gabriel Austin was curator of the Grolier Club (a society for bibliophiles located in New York City) from 1963 to 1965 and librarian from 1965 to 1970. Jean Grolier was a French court official and bibliophile who served in various capacities under Louis XII, Francois I, Henry II and Charles IX. He was a patron of French and Italian scholarship and printing. Grolier's extensive library may have numbered as many as 3,000 volumes, and he commissioned elaborate bindings for many of them. The collection was dispersed in 1676, but about 561 titles have been traced to their current owners. The Grolier Club published Austin's The library of Jean Grolier in 1971.

Gabriel Austin was Curator and then Librarian of the Grolier Club (1962-1969), head of the book department at Sotheby Parke-Bernet (1969-1975), and owner and operator of Wittenborn Art Books (1975-1992), all in New York City. He saw the need for better control of the catalogs of French auctions while preparing his book, The library of Jean Grolier: a preliminary catalogue, published by the Grolier Club in 1971. Austin organized his work on the French auction catalogs in emulation of George Leslie McKay's American book auction catalogs, 1713-1934: a union list (1934). In creating his own work, Austin made use of lists by Waters S. Davis in the 1920s and 1930s, which derived from information in the catalogs of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the British Museum (now Library), the New York Public Library and Harvard University, as well as catlogs in the Grolier Club. Austin visited additional collections and delved further into the collections of the BNF. He viewed his list as an index to the names of book collectors in France as well as a record of auctions.