Artful illumination gives visitors a better glimpse of the shelves of books lining the (inaccessible) balcony, hinting at the atmosphere of the grand library on the third floor. “It pulls the books right down into the center of the room,” said Bruce Crawford, the club’s current president (and a collector of Dickens and other 19th-century authors).

On the way up to the members-only spaces , Mr. Holzenberg offered me a quick look into the second-floor gallery, where a half-dozen members were installing “Two American Poets: Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams,” a new exhibition drawn from the collection of Alan M. Klein, a member and lawyer.

I made the mistake of tsking that no one was wearing gloves.

“Never gloves!” several people exclaimed at once. They compromise the grip, as it turns out, increasing the risk of dropping or tearing something.

Up in the library (open to researchers but not the general public), Meghan Constantinou, the club’s librarian, opened a not-so-secret door concealed in a bookshelf. It opens to a staircase that leads to more shelves holding some of the library’s collection of more than 150,000 bookseller, auction and private library catalogs, as well as over 40,000 books about books.

Ms. Constantinou, a collector of women’s bookplates, had pulled out one of the oldest printed books in the collection: a copy of Flavius Joseph us’s “The Jewish War,” published in 1470 by a Rhineland printer named Johann Schüssler (no known relation to this reporter, alas).