Bookshelf for sale

At the back of Rebecca Romney’s new book Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend is a twenty-eight-page appendix listing some of the rare or quirky editions that Romney amassed while pursuing her researches into Austen’s predecessors and contemporaries.

There’s a 1796 first edition of Frances Burney’s Camilla, whose subscriber list includes one “Miss J. Austen.” There’s a late-Victorian set of Maria Edgeworth’s novels, bound in green cloth and stamped with clovers, lyres, and Celtic knots, the better to highlight Edgeworth’s Irishness. There are gilt-edged pages, morocco spine labels, and marbled endpapers galore.   

And now these books will be on display—and on sale—at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, taking place April 3-6 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Type Punch Matrix, the Washington D.C.-based rare book firm that Romney co-founded, plans to highlight her Jane Austen’s Bookshelf collection at its booth. (General admission tickets to the fair, which can be bought online, cost $32 for a single day.)

"Book collecting is about appreciating books as individual historical objects,” Romney says in an online press release. “I can't wait for these copies that inspired my book to begin to find their way into the hands of collectors and institutions."

Romney’s book interweaves short biographies of eight female authors whose work Austen knew with the story of Romney's own development as a reader and rare book professional. Along the way, Romney chronicles her efforts to track down important editions of works by once-famous writers who are far less well-known today, including Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Ann Radcliffe, and Charlotte Smith.

Romney argues that many of these writers fell out of the canon for reasons that have less to do with the quality of their works—often excellent, she says—and more to do with the vagaries of literary reputation and the biases of critics. It’s not an original argument, as she admits, but her fascinating mini-biographies of women writers are by turns inspiring, heartbreaking, and infuriating.

Although Romney’s love of Radcliffe’s deeply tedious The Mysteries of Udolpho suggests that she and I have rather different taste, Jane Austen’s Bookshelf inspired me to add a few titles to my TBR list. Not having the budget of a collector or an institution, I’ll probably stick with paperbacks or ebooks—but it would still be thrilling to see Romney’s editions up close.