Rebecca Romney

@rebeccaromney.com

4653 Followers 193 Following

Your bookish enabler. Rare book dealer, Type Punch Matrix. Author, JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF. Co-founder of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. Pawn Stars, The Booksellers doc.

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
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
Selection of cards laid out, including Thomas Becket, Patrick Henry, Lafayette, Caesar, and Peter the Great
Selfie at the airport, with me, happy tired, looking incredulously at the camera
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.”
Image of JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF with a band around it including the Heywood Hill logo and “signed copy”
Holding up a copy of Jane Austen’s Bookshelf in McNally Jackson with other “new and noteworthy nonfiction” in the background
Screenshot from an article about the Lilly Library Romance exhibition that describes me as “an author, scholar, and book historian”
Front cover draft of the catalogue, which says Type Punch Matrix, and features alternating horizontal stripes of beetles and people progressing across the page
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
Double page spread of woodcuts of fish in lovely scaly detail, from a 1553 “compendium of Bavarian law”
Copperplate engraving with seven figures of various types of dragonflies
Title page of The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson by Jay Leyda
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.”
Front flap text beginning “Witch!”
Front cover of Dark Magic showing a woman at a central altar holding a skull. She’s in a semi transparent fishnet deal with flames behind her
“The Vision of Death” illustration by Doré
Shelf of books from my Austen collection with tattered paperbacks next to HC 1sts!
Handcolored woodcut of a whale, clean but simplistic, making the whale look more like a sardine
Screenshot of description for “Peck, W D. Natural history of the slug worm.” “An exceptional paper in early American natural history.” Priced at $375
Front cover of JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKSHELF showing portraits of Burney and Inchbald among book spines
Front cover of a book titled Told by the Sandman with a hooded figure cradling a baby close
Endpapers of the marionettes book showing various puppets with especially creepy eyes, some of which are Xes
Front cover of Marionettes are People by Edith Thane, 1948
Front cover of a book titled AS THE BEE SUCKS
Front cover of Roller Skating: A Beginner’s Guide by IG Edmonds
Front cover of The Torch Singer in black and purple with a woman in a dress in Art Deco style
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
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.”
Incipit of the manuscript: open to the page where Caesar’s work first starts.
Manuscript from 1386 open to a leaf with the main text, commentary in the margin, and the scribe’s name in red ink
Winner: Elena Wicker, 30, (she/her), of Washington, DC, soon to be a national security analyst at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, for “Military Mania: A Collection of U.S. Military Dictionaries from 1776 to Today.” With image of Wicker’s collection and headshot
Banner of Lilly Exhibit, with name as in the tweet — a pink background with a couple passionately kissing in the corner
Spread of Morgan’s natural history books open to various illustrations across a table
Detail of a book from Shi’s collection: Virágos gyertyák
Maria Mitchell book open to the title page: Wonders of the Moon, 1873
One of Borden’s Yiddish primers lying open
Collection of Naruto fanbooks by Mitsuki Emi
Shelf shot of Jordan’s collection featuring Sabriel among other Dillon illustrated books
Shelf shot of Hubbard’s collection featuring all those colorful 1920s and 1930s dust jackets
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.”
Small square white catalogue with “ANTIQUE BOOKS” in a large bold sans serif; “Catalogue 21 / Literature / General” in smaller size below.
Spread of six paperbacks from the 1960s with cover art depicting women in various poses of thoughtfulness
Single printed card with portrait of Socrates (labeled in katakana and romaji) wearing a cravat and European style coat
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”
Image of the path leading to Chawton House from my visit there last summer
Open box with no padding except a layer of bubble wrap around a book that has been wedged diagonally into it
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.”
Author photos from The House on the Marshland on the rear flap, with great hat
Front cover of said book with woodcut
Front cover of Gaspar’s book with the Time Machine front and center in a gilt circle
Image of the nightstand in the Proust hotel in Paris, showing Proust’s visage in the glass, a madeleine in a plastic package, and a Proust book
Entry for Mint Condition with “Not to be encouraged” underlined
Side view of 18th century book with waste parchment as part of the binding. The parchment shows some lines in manuscript.