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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 23/04/2025

This Thursday 4/24 come to Philadelphia to hear @book-historia.bsky.social and I geek out about book collecting and discuss my new book, JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF. Register here: libwww.freelibrary.org/programs/aut...

Press image for Author Events Presents, April 24th at 7:00pm, Rebecca Romney in conversation with Allie Alvis, in person at thr Parkway Central Library in Philadelphia, with headshots of both people and an image of the front cover of JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 13/03/2025

When is the last time we talked about the stunning jacket design for the 1946 first edition of Ann Petry’s THE STREET? Let’s talk about it more. I wish I knew the artist.

Front cover of the Street with an orange ombré effect and a portrait of the main character in the top left corner, half on the front and half on the spine

Side view of The Street jacket showing the full view of the portrait of the main character across the spine and front panel

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 12/03/2025

Now on its way to a special collections library: these Meiji era (1886) educational cards introducing Japanese students to major figures of Western history and literature, based on the classic Iroha Karuta matching game. Among those included: Newton, Homer, George Washington, Cleopatra, & Moses.

Selection of cards laid out, including Thomas Becket, Patrick Henry, Lafayette, Caesar, and Peter the Great

Selection of cards laid out, with Elizabeth I, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin visible

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 06/03/2025

My surprised/grateful/joyous/exhausted face as I learned during a 2-hour flight delay that Emma Straub recommended my book this morning on the TODAY Show:

Selfie at the airport, with me, happy tired, looking incredulously at the camera

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 03/03/2025

So gratified to see @theguardian.com review JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF: an unforgettable phrase, “canon jujitsu”! www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Excerpt screenshot from the Guardian review: “Jane Austen’s Bookshelf is brilliant stuff - a bold bit of canon jujitsu, sparked by the simplest of questions, leading to the most enraging of conclusions, but driven by the sheer pleasure that anyone who has ever read Burney’s Evelina can attest to.”

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 28/02/2025

If you’re in London, the delightful Heywood Hill has signed copies of my book available:

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 18/02/2025

It’s finally publication day for JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF — so excited for readers to learn about Austen’s favorite authors! bookshop.org/p/books/jane... Audiobook: www.simonandschuster.biz/books/Jane-A...

Holding up a copy of Jane Austen’s Bookshelf in McNally Jackson with other “new and noteworthy nonfiction” in the background

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 13/02/2025

Fascinating that being an antiquarian book dealer is a factor to be elided when talking about the romance rare book collection I sold to the Lilly!

Screenshot from an article about the Lilly Library Romance exhibition that describes me as “an author, scholar, and book historian”

A screenshot of the Lilly Library Romance exhibition website describing me instead (and more accurately) as an “author, scholar, and antiquarian bookseller”

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 12/02/2025

Our upcoming print catalogue at the shop includes a rare 18th-century book on insects — so we are leaning into that for the cover design 🪲

Front cover draft of the catalogue, which says Type Punch Matrix, and features alternating horizontal stripes of beetles and people progressing across the page

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 10/02/2025

Another addition to my Jane Austen Bookshelf collection: this 1903 edition of Frances Burney’s EVELINA. My book is finished but I can’t stop collecting 😭

Photo of a bookshelf of books by and about Burney, holding in front of it two small blue cloth volumes, spine out, showing the title and author: Evelina by Frances Burney

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 05/02/2025

Me, out loud to an empty room, reading a Quaritch catalogue: “Those fish sure are beautiful.”

Double page spread of woodcuts of fish in lovely scaly detail, from a 1553 “compendium of Bavarian law”

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 31/01/2025

Counting 238 individual copperplate engravings is much more pleasant when they look like this. From the 1776-1783 German edition of Charles de Geer’s magnum opus, ABHANDLUNGDEN ZUR GESCHICHTE DER INSEKTEN [Treatise on the History of Insects]

Copperplate engraving with seven figures of various types of dragonflies

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 28/01/2025

A long day already, so I’m soothing myself by changing early into pajamas and popping into to see what Emily Dickinson was doing day to day

Title page of The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson by Jay Leyda

Detail of 5 Dec 1873 entry, Amherst: "today, or as a memorial to this day (following Higginson's visit?), ED composes and copies two poems and dates them Dec. 5: "a wind that rose though not a leaf in any forest stirred, but with itself did cold engage beyond the realm of bird – a wind that woke a lone delight like Separation's Swell"

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 20/01/2025

This in response to a video I posted about narrating the audiobook for my upcoming JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF. I’m not looking to shame this person, I just remain baffled this still happens anytime we talk about audiobooks.

Screenshot with comment that says: “Listening to an author read their work has value, but can we not call it reading, you’re reading. I am not.”

Screenshot includes my response: “I can’t agree. Reading a book via listening to someone else read is a practice millennia old and has always been considered reading. Jane Austen herself read this way and called it reading.”

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 10/01/2025

Jacket flaps describing the plot:

Rear flap with text like “they came, they saw, they succumbed.”

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 10/01/2025

Gustave Doré’s 1870s illustrated edition of the Bible goes so hard.

“The Vision of Death” illustration by Doré

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 06/01/2025

To me the definition of a collection isn’t about quality per se but about mindful acquisition within parameters. So a tattered paperback might have every right to be in a collection as a HC 1st, as long as it fits your intentional parameters. See eg my Austen collection:

Shelf of books from my Austen collection with tattered paperbacks next to HC 1sts!

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 20/12/2024

Who’s an adorable little whale? You are! [From a ca. 1830 chapbook: A Short History of Birds and Beasts]

Handcolored woodcut of a whale, clean but simplistic, making the whale look more like a sardine

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 16/12/2024

Absolutely no shade to the dealer but this catalogue description is a lovely example of how the rare book trade can often feel like a parody of itself

Screenshot of description for “Peck, W D. Natural history of the slug worm.” “An exceptional paper in early American natural history.” Priced at $375

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 12/12/2024

COVER REVEAL! A riff on the fabulous US cover designed by Chris Allen. The UK edition of my upcoming book JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF (Feb 2025) is now available for preorder via Ithaka Press / Bonnier: geni.us/JaneAustensB...

Front cover of JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF showing portraits of Burney and Inchbald among book spines

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 02/12/2024

Yet another unintentionally creepy vintage children’s book (1916)

Front cover of a book titled Told by the Sandman with a hooded figure cradling a baby close

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 27/11/2024

The endpapers are even creepier!

Endpapers of the marionettes book showing various puppets with especially creepy eyes, some of which are Xes

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 27/11/2024

Today in stellar titles of vintage books (1948):

Front cover of Marionettes are People by Edith Thane, 1948

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 23/11/2024

Is this … the perfect book? From 1979

Front cover of Roller Skating: A Beginner’s Guide by IG Edmonds

Interior detail of a man skating with headphones (or… something) on

A woman skating with her hair flipped to cover her face

A dancer skating and striking an extravagantly awesome pose

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 22/11/2024

Art Deco Cover Alert This 1932 novel is set around Tin Pan Alley. Want to read.

Front cover of The Torch Singer in black and purple with a woman in a dress in Art Deco style

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 28/09/2024

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam also has a library. This is where his famous letters to Theo are kept, as well as books he owned. Like this one, in which Van Gogh has doodled a little head

A book open to a novel about the French Revolution titled “Histoire d’un Paysan 1792” with a big central illustration — and a sketch of one of the characters in pencil by Van Gogh popping out the side

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 26/09/2024

Thanks to AbeBooks and the ABAA for giving me space to talk about book collecting, and how anyone can be a collector (with a special feature of Amy Winehouse’s books!): www.abebooks.com/books/rarebo...

Paragraph from my article reading: “A collection can be anything you want it to be; you simply need a topic you want to explore, an idea of parameters (only first editions? only signed copies?), and an appreciation for books as historical artifacts. Every book is inescapably material, a product of its particular time and place, and a record of the lives it has lived since. Viewed this way, books become vehicles not just for their texts, but an entire capsule history in themselves—about how these books came to be, how they impacted the world, and whose lives they have influenced.”

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 24/09/2024

This is the oldest book in Amsterdam, made by Benedictine monks in Fleury circa 850-900CE — and a work every Latin student will recognize: Caesar’s Gallic Wars. It is also the oldest extant manuscript of the work. Held by the Allard Pierson Museum, it’s also called the Codex Amstelodamensis.

Incipit of the manuscript: open to the page where Caesar’s work first starts.

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 23/09/2024

See that red writing there? That’s the scribe of this 14th century Hebrew manuscript, Hannah, signing her name. [The book: Sefer Mitzvot katan by Isaac b. Joseph of Corbeil, held by the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam.]

Manuscript from 1386 open to a leaf with the main text, commentary in the margin, and the scribe’s name in red ink

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 20/09/2024

Announcing the 2024 winner of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize! themillions.com/2024/09/meet...

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 16/09/2024

If you have a chance, visit the Lilly Library exhibition Love in the Library — The Romance Novel in English. It’s based in part on the romance collection I sold them, curated by @arkhamlibrarian.bsky.social and supplemented with other Lilly holdings / acquisitions www.idsnews.com/article/2024...

Banner of Lilly Exhibit, with name as in the tweet — a pink background with a couple passionately kissing in the corner

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 21/05/2024

A creator of custom tattoos, Morgan collects books depicting the anatomy of the natural world, illustrations she transforms, tattoo by tattoo, into a body of original botanical art. Hers is a living collection, cross-pollinated by the ideas of her clients to produce new designs.

Spread of Morgan’s natural history books open to various illustrations across a table

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 20/05/2024

Melanie Shi collected translations of ancient and modern Chinese works marketed by European publishers during the Cold War, examining the role that romantic and political ideas of “Chineseness” played in different national contexts after WWII.

Detail of a book from Shi’s collection: Virágos gyertyák

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 19/05/2024

Margaret Landis collected not only Mitchell's own scientific publications, but copies of books in her library, biographies of Mitchell, even tarot decks inspired by her work, reflecting the many ways that Mitchell’s legacy, like the trail of her comet, remains visible in print and life.

Maria Mitchell book open to the title page: Wonders of the Moon, 1873

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 18/05/2024

Miriam Borden collected twentieth-century Yiddish educational materials, survivals of a once-thriving Yiddish school system across North America, using them to teach Yiddish to adults hoping to reconnect with a lost part of their heritage.

One of Borden’s Yiddish primers lying open

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 17/05/2024

Forster collected almost 500 original fan-made comics, from photocopied zines to hardcover anthologies, primarily the self-published comics known in Japan as doujinshi, exploring how "fanfic" subverts narrative (and industry) power structures. Many she acquired in trade!

Collection of Naruto fanbooks by Mitsuki Emi

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 16/05/2024

Jordan collected books illustrated and designed (often without attribution) by Leo and Diane Dillon, the pioneering husband-and-wife design team, from pulp sci-fi to children’s lit to iconic paperback editions of literary classics. They’re so gorgeous!

Shelf shot of Jordan’s collection featuring Sabriel among other Dillon illustrated books

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 15/05/2024

Hubbard was our first winner! She collected over 300 popular American romance novels of the 1920s and 1930s, all in their sensational original dust jackets, exploring the changing expectations of American women through the pages of these popular bestsellers.

Shelf shot of Hubbard’s collection featuring all those colorful 1920s and 1930s dust jackets

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 15/05/2024

“as if you had just fallen into a dump-heap of words” Love this amusing description of reading Henry James from Carolyn Wells’s “Book-Shop Girl” series (1903). Quoted in The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells by Rebecca Rego Barry

Image of a page in the book reading: “ the voice of the article is an insipid young bookseller who makes recommendations. When hand selling James, she says, ‘why I just love Henry James‘s books. He makes me feel sort of intellectual and queer.’ She reads aloud from the Wings of the Dove, and when the customer begs her to stop, she said she rather enjoys the feeling ‘as if you had just fallen into a dump-heap of words.”

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 16/02/2024

If Ruscha were a rare book dealer. (This was an actual 1963 catalogue of J. Howard Woolmer.)

Small square white catalogue with “ANTIQUE BOOKS” in a large bold sans serif; “Catalogue 21 / Literature / General” in smaller size below.

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 15/02/2024

1960s romance heroines were so pensive.

Spread of six paperbacks from the 1960s with cover art depicting women in various poses of thoughtfulness

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 21/12/2023

There are a lot of things to like about this 1886 Tokyo-printed card game showcasing famous Western figures that I recently acquired. Here’s just one to start: Socrates in 19th-century European style clothing.

Single printed card with portrait of Socrates (labeled in katakana and romaji) wearing a cravat and European style coat

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 17/12/2023

Sometimes writing in the margins of your books is necessary. (Excerpt from Loraine Fletcher’s biography of Charlotte Smith, p.127)

Text reading: “He attributes Eliza’s madness to her mother, who had lost her mind after the deaths of two earlier children. Eliza was begotten on the unconscious body of this unfortunate woman on the advice to her father of one Dr. Batty, whose well-meant medical opinion did not achieve its aim of restoring sanity.” Next to this I have written in pencil: “I’m sorry WHAT”

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 16/12/2023

Today is Jane Austen’s birthday & one cool way to celebrate would be to donate to Chawton House, the historic house of her brother who provided her with a home during the years when her books were published. Today it’s a charity devoted to celebrating women writers. chawtonhouse.org/get-involved...

Image of the path leading to Chawton House from my visit there last summer

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 15/12/2023

The exact scene upon opening a package carrying a $600 Ursula K Le Guin signed first edition. Kind of want to cry.

Open box with no padding except a layer of bubble wrap around a book that has been wedged diagonally into it

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 01/12/2023

Excerpt from a contemporary review of Vincent Virga’s GAYWYCK (1980)—known as the first openly gay gothic romance. Found the clipping in a first edition. The critic, Robert Taylor, pans the book. But his argument is having the opposite effect: my response to it is SIGN ME UP

Single graph from newspaper clipping that reads “In order words, Varga’s new male angle on the formula isn’t all that different from the old male-female slant. I imagine that modernity will now condemn us to other sorts of Gothic novel, the black Gothic, the feminist Gothic, the ecological Gothic, the nuclear or antinuclear Gothic, the rock Gothic and the China Gothic — but no matter how many modernist cliches pepper the stew, the result is always a mysterious housekeeper, a strange extravagant manor, rooks cawing through the twilight, muffled sobs, the clank of chains in the attic.”

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 15/11/2023

Working my way through a collection of Louise Glück first editions and I must say: she has the best author photos.

Author photos from The House on the Marshland on the rear flap, with great hat

Author photo on rear flap of Triumph of Achilles

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Rebecca Romney @rebeccaromney.com · 11/10/2023

Fun to look through this satirical dictionary from 1931: “ALAS. Early Victorian for OH, HELL.”

Front cover of Deb’s Dictionary by Oliver Herford

Detail of ALAS: “Early Victorian for Oh, Hell.”

Detail of PRUDE: “One who looks upon Nature as a brazen hussy.”

Detail of FAT: “the only sin today which is damning to a woman but forgiven in a man.”

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