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Typical model reduction methods for parametric partial differential equations construct a linear space V n which approximates well the solution manifold M consisting of all solutions u ( y ) with y the vector of parameters. In many problems of numerical computation, nonlinear methods such as adaptive approximation, n -term approximation, and certain tree-based methods may provide improved numerical efficiency over linear methods. Nonlinear model reduction methods replace the linear space V n by a nonlinear space Σ n . Little is known in terms of their performance guarantees, and most existing numerical experiments use a parameter dimension of at most two. In this work, we make a step towards a more cohesive theory for nonlinear model reduction. Framing these methods in the general setting of library approximation, we give a first comparison of their performance with the performance of standard linear approximation for any compact set. We then study these methods for solution manifolds of parametrized elliptic PDEs. We study a specific example of library approximation where the parameter domain is split into a finite number N of rectangular cells, with affine spaces of dimension m assigned to each cell, and give performance guarantees with respect to accuracy of approximation versus m and N .