Good afternoon to all of you. I'm Jim dial-up has a president of the Friends of the University of Delaware Library. And I'm excited to welcome you to today's lecture with rare books specialist Rebecca Romney. While I wish we could have gathered together in March for the annual dinner to hear from Rebecca. I'm thrilled we can come together with her today to celebrate virtually our shared love for rare books. One of the principal missions of the friends of the University of Delaware Library is to support, bolster the strength, depth, and richness of the rare and unique materials in special collections at the University of Delaware library, museums and press. So we certainly see Rebecca as a kindred spirit. Rebecca is a rare book dealer based in the Washington DC area who has spent her career building bridges between the small world of rare books and the larger cultural universe. Among Rebecca as many accomplishments are the following. She co-founded the rare book company type punch matrix. In 2017, she co-authored the book, printer's error, irreverent stories from book history. Last year, Rebecca was featured in the book sellers, a documentary about the Rare Book Trade in New York that made its debut at the New York Film Festival. You may also recognize Rebecca from Pawn Stars, the reality TV series on the History Channel, where she has appeared as a rare book specialists and fan favorite expert since 2011. As Rebecca will say, her attempts to engage a wider public audience. It's a wider popular audience with the basics of book collecting and the rare book trade had been buried and experimental. Today she's going to explore with us the ethical implications of her experiences and provide a candid account of the successes and failures of those experiments. We have asked Rebecca to save the last ten to 15 minutes of her talk. For question and answer session. Please use the Q and a option in zoom to submit your questions throughout the lecture. We will try to get to as many questions as we are able. Please join me in welcoming Rebecca Romney. Hello, I am going to share my screen with you. First of all, thank you so much for having me. I know this is not what we had originally planned, but I am pleased that we could do it in some form. And in fact, I think that we make this a little bit more accessible to people in this format. So I'm game and I hope you all get something out of this two. So my name is Rebecca Romney. As mentioned, I am an antiquarian book dealer, and I am here to speak about my experiences. Undeveloped television show about a pawn shop in Las Vegas. That's a bit oversimplified, but it does speak to my very unusual resume that fits into a wider career that is a little bit more complicated. So this lecture is really what it means for anyone. Dealer, collector, librarian, anyone who's interested in rare books and manuscripts, what it means to be working in this field in the 21st century. And most importantly, it's about exploring what we can do to get more people involved for the next generation. So I have many stories to tell about my time in the trade. I also worked with a production company. And in these processes I was teaching people about e-books and very unusual mediums. You have the casino, you have television. The goal here was to pinpoint how I was using these places as bridges to cross between the rather exclusive community, rare books, the wider world. And my question was, how do you make this bridge wider and stronger? And why should anyone care about doing so? I feel like on the surface the why is immediately obvious. I want the world of rare books and manuscripts to thrive. But this comes with a powerful counter argument, which is that it requires creativity, effort, open-mindedness, and optimism. In other words, it requires work. So two people on the outside, rare books and manuscripts are mysterious. They can be intimidating. And most people have cliched, inaccurate, or just plain wrong ideas about what books are. But when you interact with the masses, most of your work is just going basic fundamentals, patient education. So no matter how many times a visitor comes into the gallery in Vegas with, points out a first edition of HA, Cat in the Hat and says, I had that exact book when I was a baby. Even though that book was published in 1957 and they're clearly not 63 years old. You have to look and done the eye and smile and say, you know, it's such an important book in history, children's literature. And so where today in the first edition, you have to have patients with uneducated remarks because you are the person educating them. So yes, my career started in a place with a very high concentration of meaning misinformed visitors, that is to say, tourists on the second floor of a casino, in a mall or emitted with green marble and purple carpet. I explain terms like a topo and coffered after asking visitors to leave their drinks by the door from ten AM until 11:00 PM every day and until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. The Bowman where books gallery where I started, where I worked, was open to these Motley crowds. You'd see women wearing swimsuits indoors without a pool in sight. These days looking conference attendees who clearly have not glimpse sunlight and days, even the competent high rollers like that's all part of Las Vegas. And the visitors on the strip wanted to know all of those basic questions about rare books. So what makes a book where tau can tell the book as a first edition or the guy. And sorry, it is always a guy asking, Do you have a signed copy of the Bible? The trickier as whether or not he's joking, and it's about a 50-50 chance, truly. And sometimes it's difficult to gauge or whether they're, whether they're serious or not because they deliberate that pen. And so I've learned the hard way, it's actually better to err on the side of taking them seriously. I realize I'm being brother, brother life here and jokey. Using terms like the masses. But I don't mean to emphasize their derogatory connotations. This is a semantic slide that happens very easily because the Latin term bogus example, it means crowd, but it's also the route for our modern word vulgar. Yet messages are made up of individuals, each with different actions and reactions. And in that gallery where the crowds gaze ebooks isn't showcases, we saw an enormous variety. Alongside the incredulous came the devoted readers who were reacting to the first editions of the books that meant so much to them. And this is my favorite part. Like every day I talk with people about how their favorite books had affected their lives. And yes, shore outside in the hallway, I once saw a random passer-by bracing a fishbowl and actual fishbowl on his shoulder, full of neon blue booze and a festive Red Umbrella toothpick. But in our shop, we connected with others through the mediums of print and manuscript. There was the man who arrange to propose at the gallery, he used assumed to be fiance, his favorite book and prostitution is a prop. That was the precocious young girl reading every word of every Display Card, taking notes so that she could look up the books that she didn't yet recognize. There was a real estate mogul whose love of Edgar Rice Burroughs began when his wife bought him a run of the cheap Tarzan paperbacks. They were poor newlyweds. It was a peculiar way to learn the trade. I admit. However, this desert outpost swarming with tourists was founded by well established firm. So my training was guided directly by the owners who had been in business over 45 years by that point. As well as a number of magnificent researchers and booksellers who worked for them. And it was because of them that I had the opportunity not only to handle but to sell major landmarks. So it meant that by age 30, I personally sold to Shakespeare folios. And it was because of the combination of this mentor-ship in this strange location that I was sucked into an unusual opportunity. Producers from the history channel show Pawn Stars approaches when they needed a specialist in rare books to evaluate the literary items brought onto the show. Now, for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about when I say Pawn Stars, let me first begin by spelling that word for you. It is P a W in stars. And yes, it is meant to be a pun on the word you first thought, I had said. Well-meaning colleague of mine at Bowman. He had a somewhat strong Philly accent and he just loved to introduce me to dealers and collectors as the woman from **** stars, which would inevitably cause consternation and elicit or, and I would do the same thing I did just now. I would spelled the word for them and watch as comprehensive comprehension just spread across their faces. But here's the premise of the show. A man named Rick runs upon shop in Las Vegas on the strip. But Rick isn't just any pawn broker. As a child, he was diagnosed with epilepsy and he would often stay at home and just read for hours and hours and hours. He had seizures, so he would have to stay home sick. And the only thing to do was to read. And so when he grew older, he started working in his father's pawn shop. He found that he had all these little bits of accidental knowledge that other pond brokers just didn't. And so he used this knowledge to handle collectable coins and civil war muskets and antique cars. That kind of items that require specialized knowledge to sell. Certainly, he had developed a reputation for running a pawn shop that would accept weird collectible items that know the shop could. And he turned this into an educational TV show that he sold to the History Channel. Now, the format as simple, a seller brings in an unusual item, usually some sort of collectible. Rick brains and a specialist in the field to talk about the atoms Importance, its context and history, and then to offer guidance on the typical retail prices currently seen for such an item. And then he makes the seller an offer. And after all the information has been laid out in front of them, both by the specialist. That's when haggling ensues. And yes, the haggling part gets a lot of attention. But the story of the item and learnings its history is important and even Central. The way I kind of describe it as a sexier version of antiques road show. At its height upon stars brought in 7 million viewers a night in the United States. It has an enormous international falling as well, which a lot of people in states don't realize. Like in Argentina, it was for years not just the number one show and cable, but the number one show period in the country. And at this point it Arras in something like a 150 countries and in 38 languages. So I was brought on as a specialist to evaluate anywhere collect book, books that the seller is brought in. And this was really early on before the show had really exploded. And I truly had no idea what I was getting into. All I knew was that it made sense to give it a try. Now, some of you may be raising your eyebrows. The idea for a book, they're a dealer saying like, oh sure. All of your a bad show about a Las Vegas bunch up. But perhaps a bit of my personal background. Well, clarify this. I grew up in Idaho Falls, Idaho. One of the places in the US that I think it is fair to say is farthest from the world of rare books. The closest big city was Salt Lake City, about 2.5 hours away. And that's where we would go to shop at fancy stores like the gap. In college, I was an art history major for my first two years. But now, looking back, I'm pretty sure that was just me discovering museums for the first time. So why am I telling you this? It's, it's really to communicate how very much the world of her books felt, feels like Narnia, to me. I can vividly recall the first time I was handed a catalog from Bowman rare books where I was first applying for that job. I remember turning a page and seeing an illuminated manuscript in the 15th century for sale. And I didn't even know that was possible. I had just assumed all pieces were in museums or at least out of financial reach, not accessible anyway. And yet some of the items were in the low hundreds of dollars, which was still expensive for recent college graduate like myself, but almost obtainable if I focused on saving. And that catalog was like the wardrobe into Narnia and it really, it changed who I thought was possible. And this is the feeling that I kept seeing reflected on the faces of visitors to the Las Vegas Gallery. The awe of the past energized by the idea of building something for the future. So every time I see the electrifying excitement of discovery and bibliophiles learns about rubber collecting for the first time. I remember what it feels like. It happened to me. And so this is the context in which it made sense to try Pawn Stars. I knew from my own experience that there are so many of us out there who want to connect to these books. But we can't, if we don't know how, if we can't find that bridge to cross over into the world of our books. As Christopher Morley said, of course I have to get an, a crystal morally quote, people, MY books, but they don't know that they need them. Generally, they're not aware that the books they need or inexistence. So appearing on Pawn Stars gave me a chance to evangelize, as it were for the world of rare books and manuscripts. It given the opportunity to build a bridge just in case there were people watching who might see me and say, that's what I'm looking for. At least. That was my aspiration. In reality, he's her results were mixed. One reaction for which I was completely naively unprepared was the idea that some viewers thought that I shouldn't have the authority to talk about books at all. I've often seen male viewers question whether I could possibly be qualified for the job or suggested I was on the show only because I'm a younger woman is worth knowing. I'm the only regularly appearing woman specialist on the show at all. But moreover, Las Vegas is a city of 2 million. And I was the manager of the only horrible store in town. They were filming show. I was literally the most qualified person in a town of 2 million. So that one in a million phrase double that. Who else would they have called? But apparently I'm still not qualified enough for some who can't get over my age or gender. And indeed, many of certain I'm just an actor, even though I've never once seen this suggestion made for the male cis specialists on the show. Many are also sure that I make stupid mistakes all the time. After one of my earliest appearances on the show, I really liked the story. I remember receiving a three page typed letter on a single subject. And for me that I was pronouncing the name Bowman wrong. Be Bellman, like Audi because of its German roots, which yes, I have indeed hurt. But, you know, the man who personally hired me introduced himself as David Bowman. This structure with certain however, that I had made a mistake because I just didn't know better and he decided he needed to be the one to correct me. You know, sometimes it's not always just well-meaning condescension. Sometimes it's well-meaning and just incredibly awkward. My colleague from my time at Honeywell next booksellers, Heather O'Donnel, will roughly recount for you at the time that an entire family from India called her on speakerphone looking for me, not realizing that the phone number listed on the company website was her personal cell phone. My inbox and social media profiles often get flooded with requests for free appraisals for books. Some days I login to find two dozen messages from different people in Spain. And I think, oh, there must have been a font size, my thought there last night. These would play appraisals. They're harmless. There are plenty of other messages though that are well darker. Over the years I've learned the pattern. If a message pops up with an image attachment nine times out of ten, it will be one of three categories. A book they want appraised for free. A picture Jesus, or a picture of the senders *****? Yes. I am talking about the misogynistic practice of sending unsolicited depicts. They are called from within a zoom conference with how many hundreds of people watching the news that a person you can blame Marc Samuel's last inner for that. He's the one who invited me here. But I'm not talking about this to shock or to joke. Although these angles can be both shocking and funny, I think it's important that we are crystal clear about what the consequences are for someone, especially a woman, to be suddenly vaulted into that level of attention. Specifically, while trying to maintain a normal business life. We are far past the time when women need to pretend this kind of thing doesn't happen. And pass the time to acknowledge that even beyond my own experience, that it happens more frequently for women of color. Over time, I've learned that I could not be the one to answer the bowman phones anymore and that I could barely work the floor of the gallery the way I used to. And when I joined wax, we made the decision to put my cell phone number and my business cards so that I can be reached directly by my own clients. But it seems some strolling trough, some trolling Pawn Stars Bureau Scott to hold my cards because now I get anonymous raped breaths, text it directly to my phone. Just to reminder here, don't talk politics on the show. I don't do anything controversial. I am careful to the point of land, but I received great threats to my social media accounts. And now my personal cell for talking about Peter Pan On TV doesn't seem worth it. Does it? Like this is my own folly for going on a show about a Las Vegas pawn shop, maybe especially as a woman. But there are other patterns that have emerged over the years. The messages from parents who tell me that they're bookworm donor has seen me on Pawn Stars as delighted to recognize a kindred spirit. The countless emails from people who tell me that they haven't read much in their lives. But seeing me talk with such joy about books made them decided to get a library card and see what they've been missing for real. This, this happens regularly. Or there's a professor who thanked me for a post I wrote where I reference the double standard of women in television. He used it as communications class to teach students about one way in which larger culture biases can shape how we consume media. There are aspiring booksellers who have written to me asking for guidance in developing expertise to handle wrote books. One of them recently went to the cholera integrate book seminar at my recommendation. After which one of the faculty member is referred into another dealer. And there she got a job as a cataloger. So each of these people saw my work on Pawn Stars is an invitation to cross the bridge. And they did. Pawn Stars is just one bridge, one long, wide, bizarre bridge to overcome that gap in popular cultural perception and real life human beings becoming the face of rare books for viewers of The History Channel has led to a wide range of reactions. As I think I've already made clear. Remember that for some I don't even deserved it deposition of appearing as a specialist on the show. But, you know, this by the way, is a show about upon stop in a pawn shop in Las Vegas. Don't deserve it though. There are others, though, for home TV itself automatically conveys a level of authority that's rather alarming. At times. I received not a few emails that say essentially, I have a question about rare books and you're the only one I trust. And this is simply because they've seen me on TV. And I want to say to them, you know, you can't automatically trust people on TV, right? They have, in this case, sort of innocently stumbled upon a fair and honest dealer, yes. But I wouldn't say that about plenty of the other experts that I see on TV. And this is a fascinating idea that TV inherently carries with it authority. That platforms themselves are unconsciously acquainted with authority. And this is a particularly important idea today in our political climate. And it carries with it many responsibilities. Because let me tell you, the production company making a television episode, they don't care about accuracy like you do. They don't care about reality like you do. I'm sure that you have heard that reality shows are not in fact reality at all, but completely staged. That's not my experience for Pawn Stars. The only kind of staging I agree to is asking a cylinder come back at a certain time so that I can fill around my own life running a gallery. But in my experience upon starts, the unreality comes in subtler and in some ways more pernicious forms. For example, in nine years of filming with the show, coming on nearly a 100 episodes now, I have only evaluated three books written by women. All of those were in the past year and all of them were white women in the first eight years. Therefore, I had valuated no books by women. Now, if this shows meant to be educational and if my role is to introduce to a large popular audience Basic Concepts in rare books, tell me, is it representative our literary heritage that less than 4% of the books were written by women. By the end of the 18th century, more women were publishing novels and English than men. So the answer to that has been know for literally hundreds of years. But this filter, the filter of pawn stars producers, gives the impression to a wide audience than it is. Now. It's easy to overlook the importance of the small factors. But let's stop and think about how rare books and manuscripts are depicted in popular culture. Think about depictions like joint doubled, the midnight gate, which I hear endlessly. Or they flirtatious intellectual women of the big sleep, which I also hear about over time, and how those images help or harm us. I'll give you one practical example. I receive never-ending grief from viewers. You yell at me for not using white gloves when I touch a regular printed books. It doesn't matter how many times I cite articles by conservationists, official statements by the likes of the British Library or at home. Or simply explain the logic behind why I don't. To these people, I am committing a cultural crime. Why? Because they've seen too many images of people handling expensive books with gloves. For years. It was the preferred way to depict rare books and media. It makes him seem more special or expensive. But I'm not going to perpetuate that myth. If there's a case in which glyphs are merited like a photographic negative, then, of course, But I have stories. I've heard stories direct from librarians who came to local news photographers asked him to wear gloves just for the photo. And they agree because they want that to happen and they think it's a small compromise to them. I want to reply. Don't give in. You are perpetuating a practice that you know, does home more harm to books than handling them with clean, bare hands? The news outlet doesn't want to pull your story. So like. They're not going to freak out if you say that, just like the production company doesn't want me to walk off the set upon stars. So in some cases you do have power. I personally use that power every chance I could get. I consistently really, it felt like endlessly had to break the bad news to producers, sellers and Rick. And honestly the audience gets a kick out of it. In one episode they kept a moment in when I head scolded Rick for opening a book too wide and had made him usable cradle. And viewers, they regularly comment about how much they love that scene. It's because they want the books properly cared for to. I remember once a production assistant excitingly relaying to me information on a book that a seller $150 thousand for the seller was quote, only aware of one of the first edition of this book inexistence into quote after glass the title page in about five minutes using the right databases I had to teller. Yeah. No. There are multiple copies of this book available online right now for 15 to $25 and there are literally dozens of institutional holdings. So that was a $50 thousand no, upon stars, I am the destroyer of dreams. That is my job. But as you may have seen by now, myth busting is key to my personal strategy of bridge-building. Counterintuitively pointing out common mistakes tense to treat people rather than intimidate them. On the other hand, there are some cases that you don't have control. As anyone quoted in an article knows, editors can't read your mind and you can't read theirs. And inevitably, something is going to go wrong at some point, even with the best of intentions. The pond start scheme, for example, they meant well by me, but mistakes still happen. On one occasion, I was evaluating a first edition of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. This is his pastoral symphony. It's a piece of program music, meaning that the music was meant to symbolize real life triplets for the stream of running water and that type of thing. And while I introduce the Pawn Stars audience to program music, I talked about the particulars of that copy. Beethoven's introductions are printed in the front of each movement in his original German. But the publication, it was from Paris. So the title page was in French. And unfortunately, the editor made the decision after the fact to cut to a detailed the French title page running the audio of me describing the German text. So now forever in TV land, there's a clip of me looking like, I don't know the difference between French and German. And honestly, this bothers me far more than any of the messages I received. So when you step into public, you automatically lose a certain amount of control. Sometimes this is frustrating. Sometimes it's just funny. There was a period when I filmed episodes while pregnant with my second child. But now because this is tv land, some of you will see these episodes and they think they're new. And they will write me to congratulate me on my pregnancy. And I'm like, Thanks you six. So thanks to TV reruns, I am eternally pregnant. An uncomfortable position. The sheer amount of your image you lose control over. Thinking about, is it worth it to step into the public to speak up in order to build bridges. You have to realize that whatever you put out there, you're going to lose control of it at a certain point. But the problem is that no one can hear your message at all if you don't stand up to deliver it. So how do you find that balance between communicating your vision and losing control of it? This is the question I've been wondering my entire career and I wish I had a clean answer to this honed over years of experience. But all my experience has shown is that every situation is different. I'd learned that Facebook attract some of the worst fan and pulses. Twitter though, is easier to manage and Instagram is kind of somewhere in between. I've learned that our newsletter reaches those interested in relevant content while removing a lot of the problems of meeting to moderate an unruly comment section. I've learned not to care about what information peers, random sites about Pawn Stars, but instead work to create curated spaces online that I control. But even in the face of misinformation, I feel like I must keep talking because I want to invite more people into Narnia. I want to pull them across the bridge into this world. And I'm constantly looking for ways to do that. In fact, I believe that the very survival of the Arabic world depends upon it. Normally at this point I roll up the story of Robert cotton, the great collector of manuscripts in the era of Queen Elizabeth, the First and King James Cotton saved and preserved in his collection, which later became the foundation the British Library, the only known copy of Beowulf. And the importance of that, by the way, it was not fully recognized until well into the 19th century. Unfortunately, though, more recent events have giving us, given us an all too pertinent example of what I mean when I talk about survival. My guess is that most people here have heard about the 2018 fire at the National Museum of Brazil. The National Museum of Brazil contained over 20 million items. It's still a little unclear just how much has been lost. Some estimates suggested as much as 90% of the buildings among those records were audio recordings and documents of Indigenous languages, a large percentage of which are now extinct. The historical area of mono, Brazil once had as many as 2 thousand tribes, and it's estimated that around 500 indigenous tribes currently live. Their indigenous leaders remarked on the importance of the National Museum to the New York Times, quote, that place was like a memory, a computer hard drive, that at any moment, any ethnic group from any people can access to get information to know where they were, to not feel lost. You came from here, this is your origin. And what was there won't ever come back. No one can replace it. End quote. You wonder how something like this could have happened? And the answer is a typical one. Follow the money that museums fire prevention was not up to date due to lack of funds. There was no sprinkler system in place and literally no water in nearby hydrants. In the years leading up to the fire. Employees that there's sometimes didn't even have enough funds to buy toilet paper. The funds that a museum like this come from, or almost exclusively through the national government and any other grants that the institution can cobble together. The government literally did not value the museum. The year before when termites were discovered during a big fossil exhibit, the museum had to resort to crowdfunding to raise the necessary money for treatment. This is why bridge-building matters. This is why so many of us in rare books must make an impression on popular opinion. This is why we need to encourage the next generation of book collectors. The more these values become niche, the fewer resources we will have to carry them into the future. Our future is what we make it or what we don't make it. If we don't build bridges. If we don't convince the next generation of the importance of what we're doing, then how can we expect people to understand what we do and why there must be a cultural shift. We cannot be the few who get it. We phew, don't run the funding of every institution that handles irreplaceable material. We phew, don't know every person in the United States whose family saved an important document but doesn't know what to do with it. We can't edit or critique every article that overlooks or ignores primary source material in favor of an artificial narrative. We, as a whole, the entire vulgar crowd, must value the preservation of printed material and manuscripts, or else we will not have the resources to achieve our goals. Say what you will about appearing on a show about a pawn shop. Gasp in dismay, along with me, When you learn about the problems that come from it. But the popular awareness it has brought to our field does have real effects. Even if these effects into being a little irksome to me personally. I remember once I was going through security at an airport and I was pulled aside by TSA agent. I was irritated as everyone is to be delayed by a more extensive random search. But when the agent smoke spoke, he didn't ask to see my bag. Instead, he said, so I had this old Bible at home and he recognized me from a show obviously, and watching me on it had convinced him that he should pay more attention to the old folks that he had inherited from family members. As the show has run its course, I have also looked for more ways to bridge built beyond television and environments that I have more control, not full control, mind you, full control when it comes to media is an illusion. You will make yourself mad trying to chase. But I've made my experiences are my experiments, like my current newsletter book curious, or my book printer's error, which was specifically an attempt to make web of content for a popular audience. But in a medium over which control printers era, there's a title which is irreverent storage for book history was meant as 1350 page long bridge-building exercise. Now, naturally, I have a deep and abiding love for books on books. But I'll be frank printers or it was an enemy in many ways. Me figuratively walking into the book on books room, kicking over the table and walking out. It was an attempt to wake people up like a commotion aimed at those standing just outside the door. My coauthor and I wanted to tell stories that demonstrate the very human core of history and create a bridge through our shared humanity for modern readers to connect with the past. As we say in the book, the printed word is glorious, but it's also nuts because we are gloriously nuts. And I'll take one moment to give you an example that will probably be appealing to a number of people in our audience here because it is than Franklin, Pennsylvania, good. Cuz at the 200 pounds sterling, the Benjamin Franklin needed to open his shop was not an easy sum to come by, but with the help of friends and investors. And despite one failed engagement, he was able to scrape together, together enough cash to make it happen. And now he was free to pursue the printers ultimate goal, which is documented as early as 1534. Nearly all master printer striked, first of all, after profit. But even with the printing press in hand. Franklin couldn't just slapping, gone type and expect to make a living. 2k understood in this way. Andrew bradford, Who on the government printing contracts and Samuel climber who swept up the leftover table scraps. Franklin had to break their stranglehold on Philadelphia or go under. Now the first step was to destroy timer. Timers. Xoom came with Franklin's decision to begin printing a newspaper in 1729. Philadelphia already hadn't newspaper. It was Andrew Bradford, American weekly mercury. According to franklin, It was quote, a paltry thing, wretchedly managed and in no way entertaining. But it wasn't newspaper nonetheless with words and news and stuff. The question was why anyone would need more than one newspaper in a single city? Back in 1720, even when Franklin's older brother started his own paper concern, France made the argument that American colonies already had a newspaper. According to Franklin quote, one newspaper was in their judgment enough for America. So Turkheimer gets wind of Franklin's plants and he decides to retaliate or rather preempt him by essentially establishing a newspaper first, he calls it the universal instructor in all arts and sciences and Pennsylvania Gazette. As it turns out, Franklin or sorry, timer was just as bad at running a newspaper as he was naming one. Wracking his brand for something that might give him an edge over Bradford is mercury. He came up with a brilliant idea to headline each issue with an entry from a 1728 encyclopedia. So that means front page news of issue number one would've been the lexical entry for a Yes, just day, quote, eval, the first letter of the English alphabet, C letter. Well, an alphabet where that relates to a considered in each of those capacities is delivered with people in the 17 twenties. Found that about as interesting as you did, franklin publicly observed that at the rate camera was publishing is noobs newspaper, quote, it will probably be be 50 years before the hole can be gone through, unquote. If that were something a person would even want to do, which it was not. The paper fared incredibly poorly. And after less than a year in circulation, camera gave in and sold it to Franklin for pennies on the dollar. And this is Franklin's here. Note how Franklin shorten the name. And in case you're wondering air, that's how far the camera made it. Air. Of. Another example, a bridge building is the book collecting award that my former colleague, Heather O'Donnell and I founded in 2017. It's called the Honeywell X Prize. Now, it was meant specifically to encourage a younger generation of women to collect and to showcase examples of how to build these collections. The fundamental idea behind this is bridge-building. And I want to tell you a bit more about prize because to say, no matter how pessimistic you are about the culture, learning about these collections being developed by younger generation will demonstrate that there is cause for optimism. If we build on the momentum that's already there and cultivate others when we have the opportunity. We should be proactively looking for these opportunities. And as we saw with the prize, the demand really is there. So just to give you an idea of what the price is about, it's an annual worth $1000 for an outstanding, outstanding book collection conceived and built by young woman. It's open to book click-throughs and United States, age 30 and younger. Contestants don't need to be enrolled in a degree program and they don't require a sponsor. Collections aren't judged on their size, their market value, they're judged on their originality and their success in eliminating their chosen subjects. So in other words, the prize rewards creativity, coherence, and rigor, not time, money, or access. Now, the inaugural competition produce not only significantly more submissions than we expected, but also demonstrating, demonstrated a Hartley wide range of interests, backgrounds, goals. We were so impressed with the results that we decided actually to grant awards to multiple collectors. That was one prize winner and a handful of honorable mentions. And we've done that every year sense. And in the first year we had the help of an anonymous donor, so we're able to offer a prize money to our honorable mentions as well. And we're especially satisfied to learn that later his donors favorite collection was in fact one of the honorable mentions. In the first year, we had 48 contestants who helped from 21 states and the District of Columbia, ranging in age from 15 to 30. They were librarians and scientists, directors, graphic designers, high school students, college professors. And the winner of the first-ever Honeywell X prize was Jessica HON, a librarian in Ohio at the time for her collection romance novels of the Jazz Age and depression eras. Now, in some ways, choosing this collection as the inaugural winner was a bit of a feminist statement compared to other genre fiction like mystery, science fiction. Romance is shockingly under-represented in the Rare Book Trade and an institutional collections. Johan's collection immediately undercuts any arguments that this gap is because good material simply isn't there. For collection shows how you can do romance, right? With Bibliographic rigor or refined focus and a collection full of epiphanies. Han had by then collected some 300 popular American romance novels of the 19 twenties and 130s, all with those vivid original dust jackets. And she was trying to create a bibliography of quote, unquote frivolous fiction, aiming quote to capture women's experiences through the lens of romance novels in the decades between women's suffrage and World War II, gone paying particular attention to the rise of the career woman as an archetype. And in 2019 she became a member of the girl your club. Another favorite among our honorable mentions from that first year estuaries, Francis, mindful of the redevelopment proposed for Queens neighborhood, Francis collects works by and writers most of color, many of whom are self-published or published by independent presses. And her collection includes checkbook scenes, are spokes, memoirs, novels, poetry, all by registering, cleans and shared with community, local literary events. So in this collection, she's embarking on a cause of documentation for demographics that are traditionally not documented or undocumented through mainstream means. These are poorer neighborhoods or cultural communities of people of color. The kind of areas that are often more likely to disappear from the historical record. And for Francis, this collection started as filling a gap, filling a gap what she thought and then became something more. She talks about how she presented the collection of books to remote the authors that she knew existed in Southeast Queens but lacked a space in order to showcase their work. And then she talks about how it moved beyond promotion to a mission to cultivate the literary community in Queens, in Southeast Queens. So you can see the collection led to more discovery that you think there's a gap, and instead you discover hidden vibrancy. Now, the last one I'll mentioned in previous years, there's, so, there's some really good ones, so it's hard to pick. But this one felt very relevant. This is the collection of cement them autonomy. As a professional disaster all just montane collects firsthand accounts of disasters, fires, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions. She focuses on these accounts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and these accounts therefore predate the academic discipline of emergency management. She aims to preserve and increasingly vital piece of the historical record. In her essay, she talks about how we don't want the peoples, the stories of how people survive disasters to be a secret. We want that information to be shared. Like, why should the field of emergency management reinvent the wheel dealing with every disaster when we can study accounts of previous disasters to see what worked and what didn't. She said she was gathering primary source material because as you see, quote, If I do not find and care for these folks who well, while tonal emphasizes the importance of preserving primary sources and accessibility to those sources, sources. So it's kind of an antiquarian activism. This year we announced the winners only in September, which I realize feels like an eternity, but was in fact only a few weeks ago or whenever it was very important for her collection of 20th century Yiddish primers and workbooks. Warns collection started as something personal and then it developed into a wider resource. So it's Yiddish, educational materials like language primers, song books, workbooks, flashcards, scripted and cool school plays. These artifacts testify to a once thriving Yiddish school system across North America and network that collapsed after World War II as Jewish immigrants assimilated and Hebrew emerged as the language of the state of Israel. As a teacher of Yiddish word now uses these vintage materials to instruct adults hoping to reconnect with the last part of their heritage. Now, what we've begun to see now that were coming on our fifth anniversary of the prize is the development of the little subculture among these young bibliophiles, like an awakening as to what the physical artifacts themselves mean. And as they come to see this potential there demonstrating that they are more than game to contribute in a matter that would make any book clever crowd. Finally, I want to end on my most recent endeavor, which in many ways has been in progress the longest. In 2019, I finally formed my own verb accompany type bunch matrix with my co-founder Brian Cassidy and the Washington DC area. Though my rare books career has taken me from Vegas to Philadelphia to New York. We chose DC thoughtfully. At the company's inception, we had actually planned to open a gallery downtown where both locals and tourists could visit. Over the years, I just heard so many stories about the seeds of a book collector beginning in browsing a secondhand or net Square Bookstore. And yet more and more rare book firms are becoming online only affairs. So we aim to be that shop and DC and we'd picked a spot, we'd started negotiations on the lease, and then we were devastated when the lease fell through because an existing tenant claimed decided to claim that spot. And then the pandemic hit. And we've realized that in fact, we got incredibly lucky but at least falling through because I don't I don't even know what would have happened. So our dreams to run an open shop for browsing, open, accessible to all commerce. They've been a bit differed in these unprecedented times. But type bridge matrix wasn't founded on that single factor as or method of building bridges. I hope this lecture has shown that I'm actually more of a multi-pronged approach type of person. My co-founder and I have over 35 years of experience in rare books between us. And so we felt that now that we knew the rules that we could begin breaking them. In developing TPM, we looked at every aspect of our book-selling and asked ourselves, is this really the best method, or do we do it that way? Because that's just how it's always been done. Accessibility has been foremost in our minds during this entire process, and we've even changed the way we catalog our books. So here's a typical rare book description on the left, which is really the height of elegance in our world. It's a great description frankly. And then ours are on the right. And the first thing I want you to notice is that in traditional descriptions, all at the technical details go first. But I saw it day after day speaking to Las Vegas tourists and answering questions upon source bands that trade jargon and rare books can actually be incredibly demoralizing and intimidating to new collectors. Like, wow, this is a partition, my favorite book. Wait, what's an Dubbo? What's sympathy that agree Reebok mean, isn't Morocco country? Maybe I should be getting involved in something I clearly know nothing about. So a TPM, we still include the technical information. Everything a buyer needs is right there in that documentation. But we move it to the end, like the fine print that it is, because we just don't want people to feel defeated from the jump. Intimidation is a huge problem in our field. Something else to us while we're on the screen is that we provide fuller citations of sources. Like a veteran rare book collector knows what EST C means, but a new one likely does not. Ecc by the ways English short title catalog, which you're not going be able to Google and figure out unless you already know what the acronym means. Another way that we want to build bridges and our cataloguing is by keeping up to date on the most correct terminology used in various subjects that were covering, especially when we're handling materials of a sensitive nature. So for example, following the work of University of Delaware is own Gabriel foreman and others. We've created an internal company style sheet in order to ensure or work accurately insensitively describes materials relating to the institution of slavery. And in addition to educating ourselves, we have to recognize the tensions and potential blind spots inherent in the reality of white booksellers like myself, handling sometimes expensive historical material, a trauma, especially for African American audiences. So we also higher paid consultant who's a specialist in this material. And she reviews and edits are descriptions. Those interested in the concrete actions that type much matrix has taken and continues to take regarding social justice can find a description of our commitments for public accountability on our website. In our marketing materials to we built bridges in multiple ways. We consciously seek to include a wide range of backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences in our catalogs. Which can be as simple as checking the proportion of women authors that we've included. Since, as you saw with Pawn Stars, their contributions tend to be more easily, easily overlooked or made invisible. But it can also mean more longer term commitments like my own specialization on Japanese printed matter that gently resist the Western tradition as the default for literary achievements. Now, that's more behind the scenes stuff that we don't always draw so much attention to in the final product. But there are other ways that we do try to build bridges very explicitly in our catalogs. And in part we do this by just trying to make it fun. So this here is our second catalog, produced a little less than a year ago. Classics pulped. The idea behind this catalog was to push back a bit on the assumptions people might have about collecting. Like that will collecting is only about those headline grabbing Shakespeare folios and first editions of Leaves of Grass. So here we put the copy of a book commonly assumed to be the collectible one on the same visual flooding as a book that is not. The one on the right is an, a first edition isn't worth, in many cases in this a few $100 here it's $35 or $50. And they're not even hardcover books. This catalog was of course meant to be sort of like an amusing tour for anyone whether they collected or not. But it also was meant to subtly suggest, look, if you don't have money for a first edition of Catcher in the Rye, did you know that the first paperback edition actually has a great story behind it too. As we saw with examples from X Prize, it's not money. That's the barrier to more people collecting. It's one's own assumptions about what will collecting is that discourages the creativity. That is one of the best parts of collecting. So that's how I'd like to leave this with you today to think about what your assumptions about what book collecting our ask yourself, are they correct? If you're collecting anything right now or you're not collecting anything, like why are you collecting or why aren't you is it did you assume that it was just not for you? Books range the entirety of the human experience. So if you're passionate about a subject, like, I am quite sure there's a book on that somewhere for you. So for Pond stars, for example, I've delved into everything from first editions of Charles Dickens to the history of cheating at card games, to the story, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. And you don't have to have obscene amounts of money or space or time to get involved in collecting. You only have to be passionate about something. And that's fundamentally why I am so optimistic about the next generation of our books. And why I believe that my efforts to build a broader bridge can find receptive audiences. Because we are a species that loves obsessions. And I'd like to welcome you to this particular one, which touches on everything else you may love. But collecting is your own personal treasure hunt on whatever topic you kidding of and on your own terms. So what's stopping you? Thank you. Rebecca, We have some questions for you. The first question is I have pieced together a collection of Delaware history books over the last 30 years. Some are hard to find even in libraries. Few have value. Most were written in the 20th century. I am approaching 70 years old and don't have to downsize yet, but would like to plan for that eventuality. Can you suggest ways to pass on or sell my books? So it greatly depends on what exactly is in there. The first thing that I would recommend is making sure that you are keeping a careful list. Use spreadsheet of the books that are in it because any bookseller or even a institution that you approach, that's the first thing they're going to want to know is like what's in it and you can send them a few pictures. But the thing that is most helpful is if you have already done the work of cataloging. And if you've done the work of cataloging, that saves a lot of time and effort and therefore money of institutions of dealers who may be interested. So that is something beforehand you should do. I will say, I am very glad to hear a question like this because it is really important that people think about these things before things get bad, before they need to be dealt with. Because that way you can plan a lot more carefully. Something focusing on Delaware history. There's a real chance that a local institution would want that collection. Some cases there may be to me duplicates what they already have depending on what their strengths are. But there are dealers who focus on Americano or in regional history specifically. And those would be the people you reach out to. And you can find those Steelers on a place like ABA.org, which is the website for the antiquarian booksellers association of America. You can actually search for book dealers by specialty there. But first thing to do is make sure you have a list that's very sharable and that's the most important part. Hey, a second question is, are schoolchildren still taught about how they use a library's resources for research, and conversely about rare books and their importance. Well, I can only speak to my personal experience with my own children who I have been shepherding through virtual school in the past few months. I have actually witnessed my daughter, who is a sixth grader, being taught how to do this during her library time, as well as my son, who's he's first grade, who has been learning how to use library resources and how to specifically how to ask questions in order to do better research and to get those tools. I think that digital literacy and researched literacy and the ability to think critically about sources is a theme that librarian seem to me to be hitting pretty hard these days. Ok. Another question is, I worked at a used bookstore, best job ever, but the store could not compete with online stores and e-books. Do you think e-books will completely do away with printed books? And if so, do you think US bookstores will make a come back? Yeah. I am definitely someone who is constantly trying to push independent bookstores. I think they are really important to ecosystems for a number of different reasons. And I already kind of mentioned why we hope into open a gallery this is all relevant, the serendipity of being able to browse, and I think that's all crucial. And I do think that We will see more of a shift towards eBooks. But you have to remember that for the vast majority of the history of print in, in Europe, on the western side, print runs were very small, like an average of 750 copies or 1000 copies of print run. And they were in, for the first couple of 100 years, they were really more luxury items that were more commonly in institutions, monasteries. And so even if we went back to say, doing a print run of only 750 copies that are deluxe edition or whatever, that would not be different from the vast majority the history of print. And I think it's very easy for us to get caught up in how we think things should be, rather than taking the long arc of history and looking at it that way. But I will say to this entire audience While I have you, if you do care about independent bookstores, than you have to actually buy from them. If you do not buy from them, than they cannot stay in business. So I would encourage you really to go out of your way to be part of those communities if you value them. Okay? In France, the sale of old books is usually done through auctions and not through pawn shops. Don't you think it's a shame that these books are sold like any ordinary object. The thing that I find shame is one if books are handled correctly, which again is I think a big part of the education factor, but also the idea of neglect. I would much rather see a book sold to someone who's really excited by it than to have it stuck in a situation where people don't know what to do with it. So they throw it in the garage or an attic for 50 years. And that's actually one of the worst places a book can be and can really get damaged and destroyed. So to me, it's not a question of exactly how it's being circulated. It's much more a question of who's taking care of it and whose hands it ends up in. Okay. How would you respond to someone who says, buying rare or old books for our library is a waste of money since all these books are available online in a digital format. Well, first of all, they're not all. I ask anyone in digital humanities that there is a lot of work and labor and also therefore, money, expertise involved in digitizing items. And so being pro digitization is not being anti, you know, keeping rare books in physical libraries. These two things go hand in hand. They will take time and resources, and they both also therefore have different strengths and weaknesses. The strength of something digitized is often greater axon, just like this zoom meeting, we have more people here attending than we probably could have fit in that room. But the drawback is that there's a lot of sensory data that you're not getting that can be really relevant. That is especially relevant to researchers who are using this material as primary source material that you may not get an a digital surrogate. And so it's more of a question of acknowledging that these are actually different mediums and they should be used in different ways. It's not really like an either or. Okay. What was the most valuable or unusual book that you made? Dreams come true instead of bashing them on Pawn Stars. Okay. I think the most expensive book wasn't even a book that I evaluated was a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible. There was in the early 20th century, there was a, an incomplete copy that a dealer ended up breaking up and put it into a series of portfolios called a Nobel fragment. And this is very common in the early 20th century, these leaf books. And so it was a single leaf that this person who, And it's now a dealer. He had come across when he was working more on antiques and in the States. And it was in his estate on top of a bookshelf and we'd wind up being like $85 thousand. It was incredibly expensive thing, single leaf. Okay, today's talk reached more people by virtue of being online instead of in-person. Similarly, how do you see the role of digital scans of rare books in promoting wider love of hard to find items and accessibility of primary sources. I mean, as I think I've said, I completely agree. I think that digital humanities is, that's sort of the term that we'll use for getting all of these things online and in the process of it that the technical expertise that's involved, the labor that's involved that I think is really important. We need to respect that expertise and make sure it's funded so that access is more widely available and more easily available. Okay. What impact will e-books, email, et cetera, have on the book trade? Increasingly, cultural artifacts will be in the E realm. I E Leave no physical tracks. I wonder whether at some point in the future, the fraternity or sorority and book and manuscript collectors will be old half senile relics of the kit. Well, that's going to take awhile. A little in Arizona that's going to go up. So again, first, even if we go back to hardly any printed material being produced, 750 copies of a book instead of 750 thousand. That's still pretty accurate for the rest of the history prints. So it's kind of what we're already used to dealing with, we call them are books for a reason. Scarcity is part of this job. But also speaking to the point of emails and things. This is something that's been really fascinating that we really only started to see with the sale of author archives into places like University of Texas at Austin, the Ransom Center. They have an incredible collection, particularly of author archives and modern authors. That means getting their hard drives. So you can have access to that. But as you can imagine, this is one of the drawbacks of digital files is that the ability to read those files and to store them long-term is a lot more complicated than storing a book in fact. So it comes with its own problems. And there are again, there are professionals who are devoting their lives specifically to addressing those problems. Think about files you may have on a floppy disk and how you're going to make those accessible long-term if you're, you know, don't Updike. Did you read a recent Smithsonian Magazine article on a rare book dealer in Pittsburgh who was buying stolen books from the head of the local museums rare book collection. So what did you think about it? I saw the article. I actually knew about this much earlier because he was a member of trade organization that my firm is part of. So yes, I knew about it much earlier and I knew I knew know him. And I can tell you from someone who knows him that it was heartbreaking, just absolutely heartbreaking. And it, it, it was a dealer and a librarian working together really to betray the trust of, of everything that we do. You know, our goal is to preserve these materials, not destroy them. And it is now it's just it's just it's just awful. I mean. Okay. Have you ever come across a book that felt wrong to sell into our private collection? That's an interesting question. I will say I actually do a lot of work selling to institutions. And so if something comes into my hands, that I think belongs in a particular institution than I e-mail that institution. And so in those cases, the only time I will sell something to a private collectors after I have already offered it to institutions and they have explicitly turned it down. And this even goes institution, institutions. Sometimes you will offer it to one institution and they'll say, yeah, this is great, but this other institution has this particular focus, so it might be better fit there. So ask them first and I will do that too. So, you know, the goal really is to make sure that it's in the right hands. And that's another thing that I try to do conscientiously as it were a book tour that, that to me is baseline ethics. Ok. And one last question. How do you create awareness about the honey and wax book collecting price? Well, a lot of social media pushing, a lot of, we do, do advertising. We advertise in The Paris Review, we advertise in Believer Magazine. We also do a lot of sort of grassroots work. We have in the past printed flyers that we have male to independent bookstores all over the country that they have then put out on their, on their front desks and things and fluids. And we also reach out to institutions, a lot of institutions, colleges have their own prizes. And Jessica Han, for instance, her collection had expanded into what it was when we gave her the prize. But it was initially part of the prize at Cornell where she was. And so these are all the same kind of thing. I feel like anything you have to have a multi-pronged approach. We're on social media, but we're also mailing things out, but we're also asking for referrals. And we're also trying to reach into places where there's already momentum like in universities. Ok. Well, thank you, Rebecca. And thank you to everyone who asked questions and attended today. As Jim mentioned, we certainly miss gathering together for an hour, 20-20 annual dinner this past March, but are thrilled we could still have Rebecca share her insights and experience with us today. Much like her efforts to engage the next generation, the friends of the University of Delaware also host annual contests to foster student reading and research. The set Trotter, though collecting contest, encourages the creation of personal libraries. And the set Trotter Special Collections essay contests is designed to inspire the use of special collections materials in academic research. Before we sign off today, we hope you'll save the date, March 23rd, 2021 for the annual dinner which will feature Adam Gopnik that's known as a writer for The New Yorker. He'll discuss the scientists and the soul man, what humans empiricists need to learn from each other. As of now, we are planning to hold this event in person. Though that decision may change based on the pandemic and other factors. For more information about the friends group, including membership, contest deadlines and upcoming events. Please visit library dot UDL.edu slash friends. Thanks again and have a great evening.
Building Bridges: Expanding the Reach of Rare Books in the Next Generation
From Joseph Dombroski November 30, 2020
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Rebecca Romney, rare book specialist, bookseller and TV personality from the History Channel’s Pawn Stars. Romney will discuss how she has engaged a wide popular audience with the basics of book collecting and the rare book trade.
From starring on television to posting on social media, from co-founding a book-collecting prize to writing a book on books, her outreach attempts have been varied and experimental. Romney will explore the ethical implications of these experiences, and provide a candid account of the success and failures of these experiments.
Romney has built a career on building bridges between the small world of rare books and the larger cultural universe. Since 2011, she has appeared on the History Channel’s TV series Pawn Stars as a rare book specialist and a fan-favorite expert. Romney first managed a rare book gallery in Las Vegas before relocating to the east coast. She is co-founder of the rare book company Type Punch Matrix, and co-author of Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History.
This event is sponsored by the Friends of the University of Delaware Library.
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- Library, Museums and Press
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- November 17, 2020
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