Announcing the 2026 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize.

For the tenth year in a row, Literary Hub is pleased to announce the opening of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, which awards $1,000 to an American woman, aged 30 or younger, to acknowledge an outstanding book collection.

The guidelines note that “The winning collection must have been started by the contestant, and all items in the collection must be owned by her. A collection may include books, manuscripts, and ephemera; it may be organized by theme, author, illustrator, printing technique, binding style, or another clearly articulated principle. A great collection is more than a reading list of texts: it’s a chosen group of printed or manuscript objects, creatively assembled, that shine light on one another . . . Collections are judged not on their size or their market value, but on their originality and their success in illuminating their chosen subjects.”

The prize, founded in 2017 by Heather O’Donnell of Honey & Wax Booksellers and Rebecca Romney of Type Punch Matrix, seeks to celebrate a type of book collector who has often gone unnoticed. “We observed that the women who regularly bought books from us were less likely to call themselves ‘collectors’ than the men, even when those women had spent years passionately collecting books,” the founders explain in a statement. “And a quick online image search for ‘book collector’ brought up page after page of older men. By creating a platform that celebrates and shares innovative collections created by young women, and providing a financial incentive to those collectors as they work, we aim to encourage a new generation of women collectors.”

Take a peek at some previous winning collections here.

The deadline for submissions this year is July 1, 2026. The winner will be announced in September.