Announcing the Third Annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize
Awarded to an Outstanding Book Collection Built by a Young Woman
Literary Hub is pleased to announce that submissions are now open for the third annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, which will award $1000 to an outstanding book collection conceived and built by a young woman. The prize, which is sponsored this year by Biblio, The Rosenbach, and Swann Galleries, is open to women book collectors in the United States, aged 30 or younger.
According to the guidelines, “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. Collections will not be judged 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 and Rebecca Romney, the booksellers of Honey & Wax, seeks to upend the pervasive image of the book collector, and to create a more inclusive culture around collecting.
“I’ve always loved books, but even though I was drawn to rare bookstores and events, I wasn’t sure I belonged in that space,” 2018 winner Jessica Jordan said. “It seemed overwhelmingly wealthy and male, and I felt that the type of collections I’d been growing weren’t prestigious enough to be taken seriously there. Even just applying for the Honey & Wax Prize helped me see myself as a collector, one who belongs in the rare book community. Building the bibliography and writing the essay allowed me to learn more about the specifics of my collecting interests, making me even better at scouting items for my growing collection.”
“Every year we continue to be inspired by the response to the the prize, and thrilled to honor our winners, but we are most encouraged by the knowledge that young women collectors across the country have been sitting down with their books, writing essays and bibliographies and wish lists,” O’Donnell and Romney wrote in a press release. “That is no small or pointless task. We know that for many of them, that effort focused their attention, sparked their curiosity, and deepened their commitment to their projects. Our goal for upcoming years is to get young women from all 50 states thinking critically about their book collections, and to take pride in their bookishness.”
Submit by June 1, 2019. Click here for full details, and good luck.
