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This talk breaks down some popular misconceptions about private book collecting and library special collections, focusing on the way that personal and institutional collections shape each other, and the crucial role that individual collectors and local communities play in preserving at-risk materials and creating a rich historical record. Using examples from William & Mary’s own holdings at the Special Collections Research Center at Swem Library, rare book dealer Heather O'Donnell will examine how offbeat personal collections and community archives often prove most useful to historians in later generations; attendees will have the opportunity to view highlights of those SCRC collections after the talk. O'Donnell will close with some current models of creative everyday collecting, drawing on her experience running the annual Honey & Wax Prize for young women book collectors, now in its eighth year.

Heather O'Donnell:

Heather O’Donnell has been a rare book dealer for twenty years, the past twelve of them as owner of Honey & Wax Booksellers in Brooklyn. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Yale, where she was a curatorial assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. From 2001 to 2004, she joined the Princeton Society of Fellows, then left academia to pursue the rare book trade full-time. For seven years, she worked as a bookseller in the New York gallery of Bauman Rare Books, dealing in a wide range of material, from incunabula to modern firsts. In the fall of 2011, she launched Honey & Wax Booksellers in Brooklyn, specializing in literary, design, and print history.

Beyond her subject interests, she has devoted much of her bookselling career to expanding representation and participation in the rare book world. In 2016, she helped found the Women's Initiative of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (now the ABAA Gender Equity Initiative), and in 2017, she co-founded the annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize for young women book collectors. She has worked with the Andrew W. Mellon Fellows for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage (Rare Book School) and the Antiquarian Book Seminar Diverse Voices Fellows (CABS-Minnesota), and has given talks on special collections at the Smithsonian, the New-York Historical Society, and the Bibliographical Society of America, among others. She is dedicated to demystifying the world of special collections for students, private collectors, and community archivists, and to imagining the historiography that a more diverse and representative material record would produce. In the classroom, she is particularly interested in examining how historical artifacts, including printed ones, contain and reveal narratives beyond the text.

Registration is appreciated but not required. Free and open to all!

Sponsored by: W&M Libraries

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[[jgood, Joanna Good]]

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