The Tradition

The history of the LEC begins, in its historic form, in 1929 — the year George Macy founded the Limited Editions Club in New York City. Macy's ambition was precise: to publish the world's great literature in editions that were themselves works of art, commissioning the foremost illustrators, typographers, and printers of the day, and offering the results exclusively to a community of subscribers limited to fifteen hundred members worldwide.

The Club operated for more than four decades under Macy's direction and, after his death in 1956, under the stewardship of his wife Helen. During that time it published more than five hundred titles, working with artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Grant Wood, Rockwell Kent, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Each edition was issued in a slipcase, accompanied by a signed letter from the contributing artist, and bound in materials selected for permanence.

The Heritage of the Private Press

The Limited Editions Club stood in a distinguished tradition. The fine press movement in the English-speaking world traces its origins to William Morris and the Kelmscott Press, founded in 1891, which demonstrated that the book as object could be as carefully considered as the book as text. In the decades that followed, presses including the Doves Press, the Ashendene Press, and the Golden Cockerel Press extended this tradition, each contributing its own understanding of what the well-made book might be.

Macy's contribution was to bring this tradition into dialogue with the commercial possibilities of subscription publishing — to make the fine book available not only to institutions and the very wealthy, but to a community of readers who valued craftsmanship and were willing to invest in books made to endure. In this, he succeeded in a way that no comparable enterprise had before or has since.

The Revival

The revived Limited Editions Club is a continuation of the tradition Macy established — not a reproduction of it. We are commissioning a new series of collector-grade limited editions, working with contemporary illustrators, printers, and binders to produce books that reflect the standards of the original enterprise while being unmistakably of our own moment.

Membership in the revived Club will be limited, as it was in Macy's time. Those who join the Register will be among the first to receive announcements of forthcoming editions and invitations to subscribe.

Est. 1929 · Revived 2026