Jane Austen's Bookshelf with Rebecca Romney

Short Description

Why do we read Jane Austen but not the authors Jane Austen read and loved? The answer is a BIT more complicated than just "sexism." Guest: Rebecca Romney, rare book dealer and author of the new book, Jane Austen's Bookshelf.

Tags

book discussion, romance scholarship, business of books, genre discussions

Show Notes

Why do we read Jane Austen but not the authors Jane Austen read and loved? The answer is a BIT more complicated than just "sexism." Guest: Rebecca Romney, rare book dealer and author of the new book, Jane Austen's Bookshelf.

Guest: Rebecca Romney

Jane Austen's Bookshelf | Type Punch Matrix

-

Do you have a romance collection, or do you just love looking at other people's collections? Learn more about Romance Novel Collection, a new section of the Shelf Love Substack where I'll be sharing YOUR romance novel collections: https://shelflovepodcast.substack.com/p/introducing-romance-novel-collection 

Transcript

Andrea Martucci: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Shelf Love, a podcast about romance novels and how they reflect, explore, challenge, and shape desire. I'm your host, Andrea Martucci, and on this episode, I'm joined by author and rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney. And she is here today to talk about her book that is available on February 18th, 2025, Jane Austen's Bookshelf, A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend. Rebecca, thank you so much for being here!

Rebecca Romney: I am so pleased to be back. In fact,

Andrea Martucci: So the last time you came on was four years ago.

Rebecca Romney: Wow, I can't believe it's been that long.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah, it was May 2021.

Rebecca Romney: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And that if it was May 2021, that would have been before I sold the romance collection. But it was, we were talking about the romance collection. Yeah.

Andrea Martucci: And at the time, I don't know where you were at with this book. I think we talked about it a little bit, maybe offline after the recording. What stage was this book at at that time?

Rebecca Romney: Yeah, I was in the middle of writing it. So I conceived of this book in 2019. So it was somewhat concurrent to the building of the Romance Collection. Building the Romance Collection started earlier, but I think it's pretty clear if you have seen the collection and read any of Jane Austen's Bookshelf that there's a lot of interaction and interweaving of themes because that's what what's been on my mind for the past five years?

Andrea Martucci: Yeah. As I said at the beginning, you are a rare book dealer. And again, if anybody listened to our last conversation, you got a lot more background on this. But for those of you who are new, Rebecca, could you give a brief overview of the context of who you are?

Rebecca Romney: Sure, so I am a bookseller in the antiquarian book trade, rare book dealer. That means that I buy, catalog, and sell what are broadly defined as rare books. Rare books can also include manuscripts, it can also include ephemera, things that are not even necessarily books, and it can be first editions, it can be really recent books, if they are highly sought after.

It can also include quote unquote collectible books that people are interested in but wouldn't be considered truly rare in terms of scarcity. It's a wide net and it's perfect for someone like me who's sort of a generalist by temperament. Like I'm just, it's not hard for me to be interested in anything.

You just like set me off down a rabbit hole. I am fully committed.

It's a very good career for someone like me who would have actually been a terrible academic because I am not that good at specializing.

And you can see I do have some specialties, right? Romance being a specialty, the history of the romance novel, but I generally describe myself as a generalist with particular specialties.

Andrea Martucci: So what inspired you to write this book? What kicked it off?

Rebecca Romney: What inspired me to write this book was embarrassment. Honestly, I had this moment when I came across a book and it was a really important book. And it was one that completely hadn't been on my radar, and I'm a professional. As I said, I studied the history of the romance novel, I studied the [00:03:00] history of the novel more broadly, I buy and sell these things, I've bought and sold Jane Austen first editions, Samuel Richardson's Pamela.

That is my wheelhouse. And then I ran across a copy of Frances Burney's Evelina, and I had heard of Evelina, but I hadn't stopped, paused, and considered whether it was significant at all, and I certainly had never considered reading it. So when I started cataloging it, I had this aha moment. I was researching Frances Burney, and I learned that the phrase Pride and Prejudice almost certainly came from Burney's second novel, Cecilia.

And Austen was a huge Burney fan. That was one of her touchstone authors. She references Burney pretty much start to finish, from the earliest extant letters that we have to the latest letters that we have. She is talking about the characters in Burney's books like they are old friends. And I had this moment where I thought, Austen has great taste, and here I was being like, I'm not interested in Austen's favorite books, like how does that work?

If Austen thought they were great, surely maybe there's something worth exploring there. And the other thing that happened was I thought, okay, Austen is incredibly disciplined and confident in her style, so she is going to have great taste, that's the premise. Okay, let's look at her favorite authors.

I looked at all her favorite male authors, Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, Milton, Shakespeare, I had read them all. And then I looked at her favorite women authors, like Frances Burney and Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, and I had read none of them. And on top of that, I hadn't even heard of most of them.

And so this project started as a path of self correction. where I said, I'm going to create a scope where I'm focusing specifically on the women writers that Austen loved because I have systematically ignored them and it It became a pet project that initially I thought was just to correct that rueful realization of I should know this professionally.

And very quickly when I started reading the books, I realized that one of my other assumptions of it was dead wrong, which is that they wouldn't still be interesting, like even if Austen liked them, but they wouldn't be necessarily great for the 21st century. And instead, I fell in love with the number of the authors that i was reading and i thought okay now this is shifted now I'm becoming like the advocate for these authors because I feel like we should still be reading them why aren't we?

Andrea Martucci: Yeah, I had so many points while reading the book. And by the way, thank you. I got the book compliments of the author. It was a delight to have a print advanced reader copy. I marked it up heavily. There were so many points where I was reading it where it was pinging this idea and this idea that I'm thinking about with romance novels and collecting romance novels myself. So I was adding a lot of marginalia.

And I really want to credit the conversation that we had four years ago. That definitely made me think about my collection differently and my process of [00:06:00] collecting very differently.

So reading the book, it was just pinging so many things, but something in particular is I feel we've reached this point in time where we're far enough away from that early 1970s period that was a bit of a turning point in the modern North American romance novel genre.

And people talk a lot about the books from that era and understand it was influential etc. But they haven't read the books and in some cases, they're trusting media representations of the books over anyone's real experience of the books. And so I think with my own journey, I'm like, I need to read these books because it's unfair really to look back on them and just dismiss them, right?

Because there was obviously something really appealing about them. Maybe it won't appeal to me in the current age, but maybe it will, and I need to actually understand that.

And so I think the project you undertook where you were actually trying to read all of these books and you're noticing throughout the course of the investigation that part of why the narrative starts to change is that in the intervening years, people writing about the books start to shift the narrative.

And maybe those people are reading the books, maybe they're not, but all of a sudden it doesn't matter what the books are actually about. It just matters what people have said about them.

Rebecca Romney: Yeah you see this it's almost like memes. It's like the critical version of a meme, where one critic may have read the book, but they may have a particular taste. Often they're male, and very famously, one of the sort of death blows of Frances Burney's reputation was after the publication of her final novel, The Wanderer, in 1814, William Hazlitt, who was a very influential critic of the time, called her a mere common observer of manners and a, quote, very woman.

And so he used her female perspective against her and tried to corral that.

One of the things we talk about a lot with canon, a book is canonical when it feels, quote unquote, universal. And that is a very packed term which we can get into, but what happens when someone like William Hazlitt says, no, Frances Burney isn't universal, she's particular, is he is taking her out of canonical consideration when he uses words like a mere common observer.

when you have one bad critic, or one critic with a bad opinion, or a strong opinion that then becomes very influential, later generations may or may not be reading those same texts. In many cases, they aren't, and they just say, Oh, Frances Burney was really popular in the late 18th century, but I know I don't need to read her because I don't have time to read every single book, and Hazlitt says she's not worth reading.

So, fine and that is typically how it works, because that's the point of canon, right? It is we don't [00:09:00] have time to read every single book, and canon is a consensus of authorities over generations saying these books are still worth reading beyond their initial publication. That's the general idea of a canon.

And the problem occurs when we get too caught on that as the end of the story rather than the beginning of the story. To say Austen is canon, Burney is not, so Austen is worth reading, and Burney is not worth reading.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah, and I think that it is both the first reason you think about why that's happening, which, it's misogyny, right? Oh, it's because of their gender.

Rebecca Romney: Yeah!!

Andrea Martucci: And it's not not that, right? Like it is, and your investigation of the book really gets into this, that it's more complicated than that. And I think that if you boil it down to, oh, it's just misogyny, then you're missing an understanding of how it functions and how insidious it is.

For example, you were talking about a lot of the male authors or relatives in the sphere of these female authors who, they respected these women and, maybe sometimes it was paternalism, maybe it was unconscious or societally influenced behaviors, but it's really the accumulation of all of these things as opposed to malice on any individual's part in a lot of cases.

Rebecca Romney: Yes, absolutely. My sort of joke about the book is that if the simple answer is true, that, oh, the answer is sexism, then I wouldn't have written a book. That could have been, a social media post, a tweet, that could have been a single article, look guys, sexism, again, hardy har, here it is. No, it is much more complex than that, and complex in ways that are very interesting because they have these wider implications of why we continue to read books far after they first come out, why tastes change, and how tastes are shaped, because none of it is objective, and this clothing of objectivity in taste, if you dig in, everyone, I think, feels fundamentally that we understand that no one has objective taste, but that's not how we act as readers in many cases, in terms of who we take recommendations from. And so the idea with the book was to not just say, look, sexism, the idea with the book was to show the process of the unfolding of someone's not static but dynamic reputation over centuries.

And that's really where the book collecting aspect came in, because it was through the book collecting that I was able to compile the evidence of essentially when Burney stopped being canonical. And, when people say, Oh, today we don't even look at Burney as canonical at all. The idea that she was never canonical is not only ridiculous, it's actually quite recent.

She was still part of major reprint series into the turn of the 20th century. I just got a great copy from 1903 that's a popular reprint. Taking that long view allows you to investigate that subjectivity and think [00:12:00] about how it plays out in these different instantiations across generations.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah, and I loved all the times that you had this discovery across different editions like all of a sudden this shows up and this is the point at which the author's name appears and actually without that understanding you can misinterpret some other things that had happened. What's the example I'm thinking of?

Rebecca Romney: Charlotte Lennox, maybe? The Charlotte Lennox and her name being left out of Johnson's Dictionary,

Andrea Martucci: Yes, yes, yes, Yes. I wonder, can you talk more about that, in particular not putting the author's name in the book at the time?

Rebecca Romney: Anonymity.

Huh.

Andrea Martucci: Like, why were people doing that?

Rebecca Romney: This is a really good example of how sexism plays a part, but there's actually more complicated things going on, which is the conventions of anonymous authorship in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In that era, anonymous authorship was actually incredibly common. And it was for a number of the same reasons that people choose to be anonymous today, say, on the internet.

It might be in order to criticize the powerful. It might be because I think an example using the book is if you're already famous, like Stephen King, you might use a pseudonym. In order to put out a book and see how people respond outside of your famous name. Or it could be that you want to keep a distance from the work.

And in the 18th century, that was a very strong cultural bias around literature, which is that the work should stand on its own merits and that idea of the author as a famous icon, that's a 19th century concept. This sort of praising and idolizing of individual authors. That starts with the Romantic era and into Victorian era.

And so, in the 18th century, that was uncouth. You did not try to draw attention to yourself as a person, as an author. And then, that exists for everyone, but you compound it with the case of women who socially are generally considered to be not interacting in the public sphere in the same way as men, and they have different quote unquote responsibilities, but also the sphere of book publishing is commercial, and women putting their name on something that is a commercial act, it's already uncouth in some ways, and then you add the gendered element and it becomes more uncouth, right?

And Lots of people publish anonymously, not just women, but women often chose to publish anonymously, and in many cases that anonymity was just a gesture, like you would publish something and people knew it was you.

And Jane Austen actually did this, so all of Jane Austen's works while she was alive were published anonymously. They did not have her name on them, but her friends and family knew it was her, and in fact the secret was such an open secret that by the time that Emma comes out, the Prince Regent is a fan, and essentially, his librarian writes to her and says, will you dedicate Emma to the Prince Regent because he loves your work?

That wouldn't be possible if it weren't an open secret who Austen was.

One of the great examples of [00:15:00] this in the 18th century, of how it affected someone's reputation, is Charlotte Lennox. So Charlotte Lennox wrote this book called The Female Quixote, which is an incredible satirical novel. It is like Don Quixote like Cervantes, it essentially takes the conceit of someone who's reading novels and then mistakes them for real life. But instead, it's transposed into an 18th century England. And, in fact, if you like Austen, you know this is also the conceit for Northanger Abbey, which is why it's in the book.

But, it's a very funny very witty book. Lennox is far wittier than Austen. it. It's true. she is so funny, and she has such good turns of phrase, that her friend Samuel Johnson, when he's working on his Dictionary of the English Language, which is one of the great monuments of English literature, it's considered the canonical of the canonical, the most authoritative, this transformative moment for English letters, in it, he quotes from The Female Quixote numerous times.

She is the most quoted She's actually the youngest quoted author in the entire dictionary. And by quoted, I mean when he uses examples in order to show a word's meaning in context.

So she actually had this amazing affirmation of her success that was immortalized in one of the great immortal books of English letters, except The Female Quixote was published anonymously. It did not have her name on it. So every time that she is quoted in the dictionary, it just says The Female Quixote.

It doesn't have her name. And so she'll be next to Dryden, and she'll be next to Shakespeare. She'll be next to Milton, all these big names, and they get named. But when you see her, it only says The Female Quixote, so her name drops out of the conversation.

Andrea Martucci: I think it's a very interesting example to think about in the digital age, where I think something that people are talking about right now on social media is that Lisa Kleypas has been editing her Wallflower series and recent print editions and digital editions. There are some scenes that are changed.

I think one of them in particular is there's the kiss at the beginning of Secrets of a Summer Night, or there's the library scene in It Happened One Autumn. Now, if you know, you know, what I'm talking about with those scenes, but we now live in this weird hyperreality where you could have bought the e book 10 years ago and Kindle updates the edition to the latest edition without your knowledge and you're sitting there reading the book like I Did I hallucinate that this happened?

Or you have a new reader who is saying, you know, duh duh duh, I love this about the book. And you're like, oh, what'd you think about the library scene? They're like, what?

Rebecca Romney: Right.

Andrea Martucci: that's wild. And that's the kind of thing that unless you have a record of these print editions, you're not going to know about or see.

So imagine, a hundred years from now, people are trying to look back on romance [00:18:00] in the, late 20th century and Kleypas comes up and they're looking at this and, trying to understand reader reception at the time. They're gonna have to like, look at the evolution there and they will be able to understand something, maybe, about what is happening in the world, right?

But also it's like, you need that print context and you can't depend on digital records for that.

Rebecca Romney: Right. As you say, when you purchase a Kindle edition, you're not technically purchasing the book, you're licensing it, right? So they're the ones who are updating it and they have full control over it. They can pull it even. And when you actually buy a physical copy of the book, you own that physical copy, right?

So that, that's a sort of baseline thing that print enthusiasts like to do. But further this type of thing has always happened. Maria Edgeworth, who is one of the authors in the book, her courtship novel Belinda, which is one of Austen's favorite novels. This is a novel that Austen specifically mentions in Northanger Abbey to say it's one of the best.

Belinda in the first edition had a subplot about an interracial couple.

That gets removed in later editions as I recall, out of the protest of her Maria Edgeworth's

Andrea Martucci: Mm.

Rebecca Romney: And so if you were reading the latest edition of that popular bestseller, Belinda, say in 1805 as opposed to the 1801 first edition, then you are missing that entire subplot that existed.

So that type of situation where the author revises in some ways significantly based on what they worry about with reader reception, that always exists and book historians and editors are always really interested in that. And the key is for people moving forward, as you say, that it's more than just about the text in that point.

It is, what did the author think the readers were going to object to? How are they describing it? As you say, what does that say about that particular cultural moment? And that's what a lot of book historians are doing, is they're using those physical copies, comparing them, having them in hand, because that's the only way to do it, and saying, look, this is something we would not have noticed otherwise.

What does that say? Oh, there's something broader here that it says.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah. Speaking of marginalia or I guess a record of who owned a book, there was a particular anecdote, and I hope I did mark it in here, at which I paused and I went to the front of my copy and I wrote my name in it. Because it's like, all of a sudden I was like, Look, I'm not trying to, put myself up on a pedestal here, but I was like, I'm about to go record a conversation with the author of this book, and I'm taking my notes on my thoughts preparing for this conversation.

And, I want to record that these are my notes, this is my copy and I don't know, just claim it,

maybe my place in history, let me put it that way.

Rebecca Romney: yeah. And again, I understand that fear of it seeming very self aggrandizing of, oh, someone would want this copy in the future, [00:21:00] but I think you can let that go in part because the academic study of the history of reading We have always had the published accounts of how people are reacting to things, right?

I have whole print references that all they do is reprint all of the different reviews that came out for these books as they were coming out, in the 18th and early 19th centuries. We know what the critics and things were saying, but when it comes to studying the history of reading, the thing that is super valuable is what, just like general people, were thinking about these books, how they were reacting, right?

And so on the one hand, you do have the extra this is an association copy, right? That's what we would call it in the rare book trade is association copy. You and I know each other. I've been on your podcast twice now. And, we have the romance collecting thing in common. And so that's an association that is significant.

And also, even if it weren't significant at all, future historians of the book and historians of reading love this type of thing because we don't just want to know what the critics think about books. Especially when it comes to popular books like it's nice to know that the Prince Regent liked Austen, but we also

Andrea Martucci: want to know what just like maybe working class women thought who were only being able to have access to this through a circulating library where they took out one volume at a time from their monthly subscription fee, like that I think you can understand it's like inherently interesting to us because we have that distance of two centuries to say, Oh, I want to know what those women thought and then you have to take a moment and say, okay now apply that to today,

hmm.

The things that I am writing in my marginalia here might actually be incredibly interesting to a future book historian.

Some of the other things that you're picking up on in your book, one in particular was you were talking about your collection rules, and then you were also talking about some of the boundaries you put around, like when you mark up a book, when you don't mark up a book.

So I wanted to talk about Rebecca's Rules for a second. And I sent you a note while I was reading this because I was highlighting the crap out of the book and I was like, oh, I'm not following Rebecca's Rules. These are individual rules. There's no police enforcement of this. antiquarian rare book police are not going to arrest you.

Could you explain the boundaries you put around your own personal collection? Because you're in the dangerous position of this also being your job and you have to be careful.

Rebecca Romney: Yeah, so I am in this weird position as you say because on the one hand through my business I can afford to buy and I have to in fact for my business to continue, I have to buy expensive books and sell them but personally I cannot afford those

And one of the things that I did is, a great collection starts with a topic of some type, whatever topic that, you just love to talk about, that you just want to deep dive into, and that can be fairly narrow, Jane Austen's Favorite Women Writers is fairly narrow in some ways, it's broad in others, you can get much more specific, you can [00:24:00] get broader, but you have a topic.

And then the next thing is you say things like, okay, what are my parameters in practice? Do I want to In the case of Jane Austen's Bookshelf, I could have said, do I want only the editions that Austen would have had on her shelf? Only books from her lifetime.

And I decided against that because what we talked about of wanting to see the development of their reputations over centuries, which obviously would not qualify it for that narrow of a parameter. And do you want to only be first editions? That also did not fit my goals because I wanted to see what the reprints were doing for these women's reputations.

So the idea of doing only first editions was actually antithetical to what I wanted to do.

And so you come up with all these things. Do I want to only do first editions? Do I want to do a particular time period? And then the other questions, how much do you care about condition and marginalia provenance?

In my case, I said I would take that case by case because sometimes I really like marginalia and sometimes I don't. The times I don't is often if it's like a 1970s reader with a ballpoint pen marking up a book from 1813. I don't like that. Personally.

And that is part of my own parameters for reading the books that I collect, which is that if it's a book published in my own lifetime, I will mark it up.

I will write in the margins. I only do it in pencil because I'm following modern conservation practice that you don't do anything to a book you can't undo. But again, that's my personal way of doing things. Pencil is not very clear. As a rare book dealer, it's often better with marginalias in ink, frankly, but I do it in pencil.

And then finally, the big parameters, as you say, was cost, how much I was comfortable spending. And I created tiers for myself. I was very prescriptive about this. I was like, okay, if it's $20, $25, whatever if I see it and I want it, I will buy it. No big deal. If it is the price of a dinner with friends, then I will buy it.

And this is a very me thing to do. I would rather buy books than go out to dinner with friends, because I'm like classic introvert. So that's my priorities. And then, once it starts to get to something around like 100, then I'm like, ah, that's tough. I would have to save for that.

So if it's a price of dinner with friends, and it's a $100 book, that might be something that I put away money for two or three months, and then I buy it. And then, if it gets much more above that, where it's breaking those parameters, then I'm only going to acquire it if I can acquire it for my business, which means not just buying it, but being able to buy it and catalog it and have enough of a markup that the margin makes sense for my business.

So there's even a boundary there. But part of the reason that I wanted to really emphasize that and clarify that in the beginning of the book is because I think we have this idea of what collecting means. And that is not accessible. And part of why I wanted to emphasize is that you can shape collecting to your circumstances and that things that seem like limitations that you think create obstacles instead are your opportunities to be creative.

So I got a new Burney book from [00:27:00] 1903, an Evelina reprint. That book cost me $20. Like you can get a book from 1903 for $20. I say this in the book, I paid more for modern academic reprints than for a lot of the books in my personal collection that are, 100 or 200 years old.

So it's much more about sort of the hunt and the process and being thoughtful about your parameters so that they fit you rather than saying, Oh, I can't possibly do this.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah. I was sitting down. I was trying to think about what my rules were for collecting. I was wondering if you could help me. Okay. So you, you mentioned a few parameters. Okay. So cost, right? Let's actually, I'm going to start with cost. Okay. So here's how I think I would describe mine.

Help me work through this.

You have like a $25. Like I have like a 5. If

it's 5, throw it in the

Rebecca Romney: cart

don't think about it,

Andrea Martucci: no guilt. Whereas I think that anything over 10 I start to actually be like, do I need this?

But then I think I also prioritize buying in volume. like I have a few collections back here that you see.

Rebecca Romney: quantity is part of your collecting, yes.

Andrea Martucci: Yes. And so I think when I'm in a quantity phase. If I'm buying a lot of Harlequin Blazes, I have a, if it's a dollar a book,

sure.

That's the threshold of throw it in the cart, $40 for 40 books done, send it to me.

Rebecca Romney: Mhm. Mhm.

Andrea Martucci: I was thinking about the most expensive book that I had ever bought, and I think it's like $35

Rebecca Romney: Yeah.

Andrea Martucci: And, sorry. Actually, you know what? No, sorry. That is for my actual romance novel collection, but for academic books, I have definitely spent more than $35.

Rebecca Romney: Isn't that funny?

Andrea Martucci: It's so funny yeah, but anyways, so I guess I have my own tiers in terms of

price, right?

Rebecca Romney: Let's talk about price a little bit more for just for a second, because I want to tease out the implications of that as your parameter, because as I said, with the books that I can only buy for my business, if I can make a margin, our decisions on our parameters of things like price will affect what we have access to.

Andrea Martucci: And if you are buying your, dollar or $5 books, what that often means is that you're going to have to sacrifice condition, right? Not always not especially in the romance space. You in fact have lots and lots of options. You have beautiful books that are $5 and under?

However, as you say, if like you're just looking at Thrift Books or whatever. Like you almost don't know what you're going to get. They'll call it very good or near fine. And then you get it and you're like, this is trashed. And and that's fine if especially what you're looking for is things like, I want to read these books. I am really interested in what the text says as much as I am having them and on a quantity based collection, when the concept is like more than the sum of its parts what you get from it is more, then condition doesn't matter to you.

Rebecca Romney: But that's my point is there are all these different levers and they play with each other. So as long as condition doesn't matter to [00:30:00] you, then like you can always do that. If condition matters to you, then you can still buy cheaply, but you'll have to buy more slowly.

So I have a collection of Ace paperbacks that are the Ace gothic romances from the 1960s, the women running from houses. And I put a parameter, dual parameters on it of I won't pay more than 15 per book on that, and they have to be in fine condition. And one of the main reasons I did that is because it is incredibly difficult to find fine condition copies of those Ace paperbacks for less than $15.

So the point of that parameter was to slow it down. To make the process longer and harder on purpose.

Andrea Martucci: And I learned this in your book. Fine is the best condition.

Rebecca Romney: Fine is the best. So fine's the best, then near fine, and then you might, some people say very good plus, and then very good, and then good is at the bottom, so actually in the rare book world, good is bad.

Andrea Martucci: And now this is different from on Thrift Books or Amazon or Abe Books or like any of these online Amazon has its own standards.

But, or

Rebecca Romney: like new and they don't let you use fine, for example.

Andrea Martucci: right. Or I guess also eBay is like this, right? Where it's, what is it? Very Good. Good fare?

Rebecca Romney: They do have those, but on eBay you still will see copies described as fine. But often it will be, they'll do it too in the text. But, so you do in certain places like eBay, you will still see that. The places where it's enforced different vocabulary by parameters, that's mainly Amazon. Where they won't let you use the term fine for your condition description you have to say like new which is ridiculous

Andrea Martucci: When you were talking about the different conditions or like maybe not knowing what you're going to get, it made me think about, I was looking for a very particular cover of The Windflower by Laura London. Also known as Tom and Sharon Curtis, a married couple writing under the name Laura London.

And the reason I was doing this was because I bought the original cover art for this particular book. It was not the first cover of the book. It was a later cover. And and I know some people actually think the original cover is much more representative of the book, but I liked the art on this later cover, you know, and,

Rebecca Romney: that's the fundamental excuse do you like it or not

Andrea Martucci: exactly, yes. Also I don't know who did the other art, and I was at John Ennis cover art exhibition the other cover wasn't an option, right? So anyways, I was looking for this very particular cover, and like I'm sure you have experienced with online marketplaces. It's like a stock cover or it's not even the

Rebecca Romney: stock image

Andrea Martucci: right?

And you're at the whim of whoever in the Thrift Books warehouse somewhere. Are they appropriately defining which edition this is? They don't care, right?

And I couldn't find a version of this book that definitively was the cover I wanted. And I basically was just like it's [00:33:00] $4. I'll see what I get.

You take a flyer that's how I call that I call it a flyer yep

It was the cover.

I did this a lot for the romance collection oh good excellent you're like hello that's the important thing here i got it

Yeah. Yeah.

no no. But also tell me what that's called.

No, truly. I did this a lot in the Romance Collection, especially, I know you'll appreciate this for the YA series, where I was mostly focusing on first printings when I was building the Romance Collection.

Rebecca Romney: That was part of the parameters for the most part, and what I found was that a lot of these resellers, you know, especially when you're talking about they're putting them online for $5 or $1 plus shipping or whatever, it doesn't make sense for their overhead to spend a lot of labor cataloging that book. They're going to do the least cataloging that they possibly can in order to describe what that book is so that they can sell it at a dollar or five dollars. And what that means is they're often not checking to see if it's first printing.

They don't care, and for the most part, their audience doesn't care either. The people who are buying it don't care. People who want to read the text. And so I bought so many copies of these books trying to find the first printing. This is the same thing that happened with The Flame and the Flower because no one was identifying the first printing even though it's very clearly identifiable on the copyright page.

Same with Curious Wine. Curious Wine also just states first edition. It's nothing secret, and yet, it's just people were not listing it online, so I kept on having to take flyers, and at a certain point, you're like maybe I should have just bought that $30 copy that was clearly identified, rather than buying 10, $5 copies,

Andrea Martucci: yeah,

Rebecca Romney: yeah, there are pros and cons, right?

Andrea Martucci: It's fun.

Rebecca Romney: No, it is! It is! mean, I find it more fun when it works out, obviously, but also it's so much labor to do it, and as a collector, I like that. As a dealer, that's really inefficient for me. Time is money, blah de de de blah.

Andrea Martucci: And space.

So space, let's talk about space in the in terms of parameters of collection. Okay, because I over collected. I was in a voracious kind of grab everything. And now I'm having to be more discriminating I have a finite number of bookshelves. I just built all of them and I still have a finite amount of bookshelf left. and so I think, what I started to realize once I had to make those decisions is that if I only have so much precious bookshelf space, I don't actually want Harlequin Intrigue. It doesn't interest me. I actually have no interest in opening the book. I don't think the covers are that interesting. It's just not for me.

I'm gonna take my 30 Harlequin Intrigues from the 1980s and I'm gonna put them in a lot up on eBay and some other collector will hopefully be very happy for them, but that frees up the space for me to get, and I was joking to you, I was like, get a hundred more Harlequin Blazes, as if the math on that makes sense, but,

Rebecca Romney: Yeah, collector math.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah, I [00:36:00] think there were a few times you expanded the scope out a little bit more than your original idea, but, how do you work through those decisions with your personal collection? Because, as you said there's the business side.

You don't have endless space and money to build your personal collection because, you will end up not having a home or a business. You know what I mean? If you just go whole hog.

Rebecca Romney: This is one of the reasons that a lot of my personal collections are incredibly narrow in their focus, is it keeps me under some level of discipline. And similarly, there's one, I don't know, you probably can't see it back there, I have a collection that is this series of reprints that came out in the 1980s, this is the Schomburg Library of Black Women Writers, and it was essentially reprinting and making accessible, in many cases, for the first time since publication, this wave of Black women writers not only novelists, but also poets, philosophers, essays and things too, of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

And it was a landmark series. For the most part, it went to universities, so it's actually quite hard to collect. But it's a limited series. I can't remember how many there are in them, maybe 20, 25, something like that. And that is a series that's hard to collect, so it's taking me a long time to do it, which is a feature, not a bug, as far as I'm concerned.

I like it being lengthened. But In addition, I know that it's only going to be 25 volumes and not more. So the way I get around a lot of these things is I am prescriptive. I say I don't have enough room in my house to say I'm collecting the history of the Regency romance novel.

Like that, I don't have enough room here to do that. So that is just not going to be, even though I would love to do that, I can't do it because I don't have the room.

And so I look at these again as ways that you have an excuse to be creative. If I can't do that, what can I do that scratches the same itch that works within the limitations I have.

And I saw this a lot, so you know I co-founded an administer, a rare book collecting prize, Honey and Wax Prize. It's for women of the United States, age 30 and younger, $1,000 cash award for the best book collection. And I remember one year's honorable mention was this woman who was in a college dorm, and had roommates and stuff. And it's like, how do you have a book collection in that environment? And what she collected were the annual dance programs, the Odori from Geisha in Kyoto in the 1970s.

And so her entire collection fit in two shoe boxes. And that made sense because she was in a college dorm, right? So it is a mistake to look at limitations as the end.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah, the first complete collection I got was it's exactly that. Sunfire Romance.

Rebecca Romney: Yeah, uh huh.

Andrea Martucci: Okay. This is from YA. They didn't call it YA, but from the 1980s. And it's something like 32 or 36 books total

Rebecca Romney: Yes. Yes. [00:39:00] Limited.

Andrea Martucci: Yes, and I set a goal. I was like, I'm going to get every single one of them. And I'm so proud that I have all of them. Whereas Harlequin Blazes, I think there's over 1000

Rebecca Romney: Right.

Andrea Martucci: And I have 300 plus, but I think I need to have a talking to with myself about if its realistic and if it's necessary for me, like at what point do I stop, right? Because I'm not going to have a thousand and I know that, but 400, 500, like when do I stop?

Rebecca Romney: You're also allowed to have ebbs and flows as a collector, right? Something that is meaningful to you right now may not be the case in two years, and that's fine, because just like our reading, book collecting is incredibly personal. I make this argument that essentially it's an in the form of a treasure hunt.

That's what collecting is. You were attracted to these books for some reason that is particular to you. Why are you collecting those books instead of something else? Why did you go for Sunfire? There was a reason. And I'm guessing it has something to do with your childhood. Maybe not to get all

Andrea Martucci: No, it's, it's, it actually has to do with, a listener's childhood.

Rebecca Romney: Oh, and you heard about it and you were like, that's so cool.

Andrea Martucci: yes, I was slightly past, I was like a 90s YA book collector

Rebecca Romney: Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Andrea Martucci: so I missed the 80s boat a little bit, but yeah, I was intrigued, and I was like, that's a manageable collection, and, yeah, it, I think there was something about the ability to be complete that was really appealing, and, I will satisfy my curiosity and also have this fun adventure.

Rebecca Romney: Okay. So here's, I still, I love this because what that means is in many ways, your shelves are mirroring your experiences with your podcast.

Andrea Martucci: Oh, yeah

Rebecca Romney: What conversations you're having, right? What people are turning you on to, what questions they're making you think about, your shelves reflect that, right? It's example of how it can be a memoir for yourself.

And we don't change. are not static beings. And so there are definitely times where you're like, okay, this is what I'm collecting. And then you're like, okay, I'm done with this. I'm moving on to something else. That is not a failure that doesn't mean that you made the wrong decision to buy those 300, right? It just means you're in a different place now and your collecting inevitably is going to reflect your values.

Andrea Martucci: yeah I mean, and I don't know there's kind of analogy there to this book that you wrote, I think, right? Because, Jane Austen's bookshelf, Andrea Martucci's Shelf Love bookshelf, right?

Where, um,

There's also a fairly sizable record of Jane Austen talking about the works that she was engaging with, like in her letters and, all of this other documentation about that.

But you're 100 percent right where you know, it's like I had a conversation with somebody about the history of queer romance and then I collected, I have Amateur City, Edge of Twilight, Curious

Rebecca Romney: [00:42:00] Oh,

Andrea Martucci: I have my little Naiad Press lesbian pulp section up there. I have The Time I Got Deep Into YA Romance.

There's not a lot. I have a small collection of Black romance as much of the notable stuff as I can find. But it truly is a record of my niche interests that either was prompted by a discussion or I got into it and then started reading things and then having the discussion or writing about it on Substack.

Yeah, to come back to your book, that's what's so interesting about thinking about influences like on Jane Austen that, you talk about this in the book, on the one hand, part of it is the water that people are swimming in. Coming back to the term "pride and prejudice," you started questioning, did she get it from, Burney, or was it a phrase that people were using at the time because all of a sudden you started noticing it in other people's work?

It's so hard to really pinpoint you know somebody read a book, and you can see the commonalities between Northanger Abbey and what Ann Radcliffe was doing with the gothics that she was writing. You can kind of know? But the edges of it are so ephemeral,

Rebecca Romney: Yeah. And I think we do have to be careful about, imposing what we think authors' intentions are. Or of course like the kind of classic freshman fallacy of assuming that the narrator's opinions are the author's opinions, all of that. But the fact of the matter is Udolpho is described with gushing affection across Northanger Abbey

I guess you could say that Austen didn't like it, but that's some pretty powerful lying, if that's the case and so there's that and actually what you're getting to is a big argument that a lot of critics made who wanted to dismiss what they called the feminist tradition of the novel, is they're like, oh, yeah, sure, there were these other authors who were writing courtship novels very much like Austen's who had a great deal of success in their era, and we know Austen read them, but it doesn't matter whether or not they influenced Austen because all of these tropes, these things like, oh, the sort of love hate relationship in Pride and Prejudice, between Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy. Or misunderstandings at a ball. Those are tropes that exist, they're in the ether, so we don't need to make it a big deal whether or not Austen was influenced by these particular people. And for me, that's making an excuse for not being curious.

Aren't you interested in the fact that Austen said this is one of the best novels ever written?

Cecilia or Camilla or Belinda? Doesn't that make you stop and pause and say, oh, maybe that sounds interesting? And if your reaction instead was, no, whatever, Austen's the best, I only want to read the best, so everyone else is a waste of time I'm sorry, you're boring if that's your response.

Andrea Martucci: What's interesting about this is [00:45:00] I feel like it's getting at there's a conflict between what grabs people's attention and sounds catchy and interesting. And I think I actually made a joke about this essentially in the title of the last episode you were on, which is like, Nine Reasons Rare Book Collecting Matters. like a BuzzFeed article the surprising reason why blah blah, there is a need. with everything, with writing a book, with having a podcast, with, trying to convey an idea to somebody, that you need to have a hook and it can't just be guess what, misogyny, right?

What's the new thing, what's the surprising thing and that's why a lot of discourse I think sometimes feels so reductive because it's like everything has to have that oh, you thought this, but guess what? It's this. And everything has a lot more nuance than that.

Everything, but the nuance is much harder to package up into something you can quickly, easily understand to see if you want to engage with that thing. But then also so much of modern communication, just it's, everything is just distilled down to, the length of a tweet or meme length or something you can re quote share or whatever.

It does make things flat and boring because it's not about this one big takeaway that I think you can wrap everything up with.

Which, I think this is how you ended the book, right? It's not about wow, you've now just learned every single thing you need to know and I've conclusively answered, where she got the phrase pride and prejudice from. But the journey is very interesting and worth going along with, whether you end up in a completely new place or not.

Rebecca Romney: Yeah, I think today, we, are in a very fractured space for the demands on our attention. We have so many demands on our attention across not only mediums just in terms of digital, online, but also across formats of media, TV, podcasts, reading, right? Those are all lots of demands on our time.

And this is, as I said, sort of the point of something like canon, it's to make it more efficient. So that if you're only going to read a couple books, what are they going to be? And here's the answer that you know, will not let you down kind of thing. But I agree. I think that's something of an impoverishing perspective, that we get so caught up in getting a little bit of everything that we're not stopping and saying, no, that one thing out of the ten posts that I just saw is the thing that appeals to me.

So I'm going to stop and I'm going to make that my focus for right now. Instead of continuing to scroll for another 30 minutes, you could actually just focus on that one thing for 30 minutes. We don't even do that very often.

And one thing I say about this book in trying to explain why I wrote it is it was really important to me to do two things.

One was I wanted to write a book that only I could write. The Jane Austen space is prety saturated, so what could I possibly bring to that conversation? So I needed to be something that only I could [00:48:00] write. Then the second thing was that I needed to write something that had to be an argument that could only be made through the compounding effect of a book length format. It couldn't be a series of articles or whatever, it had to compound. And that's why it took that sort of very open, here's my process, here's my journey in order to make those points in the book.

And as you're saying, I even have that hook in my own, like I, I'm using Jane Austen as my starting point. That's the bait, right?

That's the bait to get people to be interested in these authors that they don't care about. Like, why would you pick up these random 18th century novels? Oh, you like Jane Austen?

But I think that in an ideal world, what you're doing there is you're not making it only about Austen. It's a yes and situation, right? Austen is the bridge to get people into those things that they might not care about otherwise.

Andrea Martucci: hmm.

Rebecca Romney: When I'm cataloging a rare book, there are two things that I will try to answer, and this is how I train my catalogers at the shop.

You have to answer first, what is the thing? Is it a novel? Is it a book of essays? Is it a first edition? Does it have a contemporary binding? Whatever, that's the job.

But the second thing you always need to answer is, why should I care? If you can't answer that question, no one's going to buy this book.

And so that applies to my book, but it also applies to if you want to convince people of your arguments, if you want to say, oh, this author is worth reading, you have to give them a reason to care. And sometimes that is that initial hook of Jane Austen loved her, right? So I don't have a problem necessarily with using those hooks.

But I think that, yeah we're in a media landscape right now where we have a lot of friction in order to spend time that way. And that's a big part of why the book is it's going counter to that. It's saying slow down, swim about in this, and just enjoy doing only this.

Andrea Martucci: And I think if you don't have that awareness of the context, the commercial reasons people do things, the social, political exigencies of a time, that I think you miss a lot of understanding what's happening then and what's happening now. So like you could say, oh, I'm going to write this really dense tome that there's no hook because I'm being very pure.

You're not going to sell the book and nobody's going to read it, right? That's a problem. You need to think, what am I actually trying to accomplish here? If you want somebody to read the book, you need to think about how you're going to sell it, why somebody should pick it up, what's in it for them.

Same thing with the texts that you're researching here, right? I think there were several times in your research where you were really calling attention to the fact that, this author in particular, like I, I think was it Charlotte Smith who really needed to work for a living?

Rebecca Romney: Yeah, she did. Yeah, she's the one who had the profligate husband who she started writing to get him out of debtor's prison. Yeah.

Andrea Martucci: right. And so when you start to understand the context of okay, this is a commercial product and there's these social mores around what you could publish at the time, like if a publisher [00:51:00] was conservative, they're just not going to take it if it has certain themes or characterization. You have to be aware of that in interpreting what these texts are doing.

Otherwise, your takeaway could be like, oh wow this author was real sloppy because the end of the book just really careless. It's like, or she was trying to finish the book on deadline because she needed to get paid. Or, oh, this character was, a goody two shoes. It must be because this author sucks. Or,

Rebecca Romney: She couldn't gotten it published otherwise. You could not have a heroine who acted out. The Female Quixote was almost quashed for publication just because there was a subplot about a woman who had a child out of That was enough almost for that book never to come out. This classic of the field. And, as you were saying with Charlotte Smith, Charlotte Smith's novels, most of them are frankly just, they're just too long, right?

And the thing about Charlotte Smith, I think one of the reasons that like she hasn't necessarily survived is because if her novels were more the length of Austen's, they were what we'd say like in three volumes. So Austen's novels came out in the triple decker format for the most part. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion came out together in four, but generally in three, not, or three volumes.

If Charlotte Smith had stuck to a three volume structure and kept it a little bit more slender, I think her books would have been more digestible and a lot of the bloat in them would have been cut, all that fat would have been cut, and then as a result you would have had a much stronger novel.

That is my personal opinion, but I think it is backed up by the fact that the reason Charlotte Smith made her novel so long is she was paid by the volume. The more volumes it had, the more money she got, so she made them as long as she could get away with that the public at the time would still read them, and the public at the time had a lot more endurance for long novels than we do.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah, you wrote a lot about how families would often do these family plays, and I'm like, yeah, they didn't have TV. Unless you were in a major metropolis, you probably couldn't go see a play whenever you wanted to. The entertainment landscape was extremely different to put it mildly.

So to bring it home something I realized about my own collection is just to come back to, it's like the most obvious first thing, and yet it's like not interesting until you go a little bit deeper into it.

I realized that I read and collect probably 95%+ Women Writers.

Rebecca Romney: Yeah. incidentally realized that, right?

Hmm.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah. And now the reason that feels like a, it's like a duh, but it's because I read and collect romance and we associate romance already with women and being written by women. It's such an obvious thing that it almost seems uninteresting and not worth discussing or thinking about.

Rebecca Romney: Yeah you know I don't think that, though.

Andrea Martucci: oh right, right. and I think this is something like in my public scholarship work on romance, I've been [00:54:00] thinking a lot about where, on the one hand, as a podcaster and a discourser and all of that, it gets so boring to just be like to pull out a catchphrase like, you know, read romance, smash the patriarchy, or,

Rebecca Romney: Right, romance is inherently feminist or that kind of thing.

Andrea Martucci: Oh, and then anytime you encounter oh, the reason people don't like unlikable heroines is because of misogyny, it's like, yeah, okay, I'm tired, I don't can we, not that I don't want to talk about it, but what else, let's go a little bit deeper here.

And this is something I keep trying to talk about where I'm like, I feel like this is a book and this isn't a Substack post is I think it's gender all the way down.

I think the reason we like it, the reason it appeals to us, at its core, I'm I don't know if you can escape the gendered aspect of it in analyzing it. Yet, at the same time, it's so much more than just that.

Rebecca Romney: I've had this effect a couple times with this book, like people calling the book feminist and things like that. And I have to say when I was writing it, that's not how I defined it. The way I defined it was this is what I'm interested in and this is the perspective I'm bringing, and these are the values I have, and these are the questions I'm interested in.

And it turns out from my perspective, that is how most people would read it as something that is feminist, so that was like unintentional. And I think that kind of speaks to what you're saying, which is that the gendered approach was baked in and taking that seriously as a topic that will provide complicated narratives and that are therefore richer because they allow you something to chew on, that you can use gender as a touchstone or a starting off point to ask all these other questions -anonymity being not just a gendered thing, but the valence does change when you add gender into it.

I think that trying to pretend neutrality is the same thing as trying to pretend that our tastes are objective, or that, what we find is a great novel in the 21st century is just better than what they thought was a great novel in the 18th century. No, these are subjective tastes.

Andrea Martucci: Hmm. Mm

Rebecca Romney: The idea of a neutral stance across the board, whether it's taste or saying, oh, I don't care about the author's gender, is, I think, folly, and I think again, it's a conversation ender rather than a conversation starter.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah, on the social medias, I saw this video, somebody was talking about how in cults, they have these just like quick catchphrases that everybody just says it and it feels like it's answering the question, but it's, a way to shut it down, right? We don't, need to look further into this because we know what it is and we have the answer on it.

And, obviously they were talking about it, you know, in the context of a cult or a movement that really intentionally is doing this, but I think we see this in culture all the time. I mean, Romance novels or you could have ended essentially with this idea of, and [00:57:00] you talk about this there can only be one female writer in the canon, right?

And that's not true. But, as you explore in the book, it's more complicated than that, and it's more interesting. Understanding publishing history, social cultural movements, understanding commercially what is viable in the market, and what other alternatives there are for entertainment those things all matter, and they're interesting, and, I was so fascinated In this book, there were things that, not just things that already appealed to me you were talking about, but things I hadn't considered, I didn't know I was interested in.

I just, I really appreciate this book. It's so thorough and well researched, and I can only imagine how long It took to do all of this and how much work you have put into it. But I just wanted to say, I appreciate what you have done here. And I hope everybody listening to this goes and buys it and reads it and marks it up and puts their name in the front cover.

Like I did. Because everybody has to do what I do.

Rebecca Romney: No, please do. I would love that. Can you imagine a collection, of Jane Austen's Bookshelf written with all these different readers responding to it? And the more opinionated your marginalia, the better, right? You could be like, yes, or no. No! Do that! I love it.

Andrea Martucci: Yes. Yeah. Rebecca, I could literally talk to you all day about everything. But I'm mindful of the fact that creating limits on things is actually a good thing. Good and helpful, so with that, I will end this here, unfortunately. But, where can people maybe hear you talking more about this book?

Where can they find more information about you? What is going on with you and how can people stay in touch?

Rebecca Romney: Sure, so if you're interested in the book, I do have information about the book on my website, rebeccaromney.com, both about where you can order the book, but also about events. My launch event's happening at the Stranra Book Room on February 18th, and that's actually with Sarah MacLain. And then the next day I'll be at Politics and Prose in Washington DC. And then there are a number of events that are happening through the spring, like at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Providence Athenaeum, etc. So if I'm coming to your town, that's one way that you can see because I'll speak or, there will be some type of event happening.

But I'm also, I'm on social media. I am mostly on Instagram. I would say Rebecca.Romney. And if you're interested more in the collecting side, then the best way to find me is through my shop, which is Type Punch Matrix. Type Punch Matrix is a rare book company based in Washington, D. C. And as I said, I'm a generalist whatever you're interested in, we have a wide variety of topics and price points.

And in the collecting side we do have, like a weekly newsletter of new acquisitions or particular, favorites in the shop, that type of thing that you can sign up for. So those are probably the best ways to find me .

And. If you do mark up your [01:00:00] copy of Jane Austen's Bookshelf, take a picture of it and send it to me on social media. I would love to see it.

Andrea Martucci: Okay I will definitely be taking some pictures. Maybe about some of the things that we didn't have time to get into, but definitely inspired, thoughts, I'm just gonna leave this here for people, particularly thinking about bestsellers and the original versus the copies versus the books that stand out in a crowded marketplace. I'm thinking about you talking about gothics, but one could very easily put that conversation on top of Romantasy right now. So much food for thought in this.

And just once again, thank you for writing the book and thank you for joining us today on Shelf Love.

Rebecca Romney: Always a pleasure. I love your questions. And similarly, we could talk for a very long time. We'll just, we'll just cut it short for today.

Andrea Martucci: Hey, thanks so much for spending time with me and Rebecca Romney today.

I wanted to let you know about a new thing very relevant to the conversation you just heard. On my Substack, I have a new section called Romance Novel Collection, and the gist of it is that I am a diehard romance novel collector, and it has led me to connect with so many other cool, like minded people on all the social media places. And I thought it would be fun to centralize all of the amazing romance novel collections that people have, and create a space for romance collecting nerds, like me, to share their own collecting journeys.

Romance Novel Collection will focus on the what, why, and how of romance collections. The goal of this sub publication is to build a community of like minded people who are interested in learning about collecting romance from each other.

I haven't posted any posts on this yet, I'm still collecting submissions and I have gotten some amazing submissions so far. If you do any sort of romance collecting, consider submitting your collection. Don't overthink it.

I'm hoping to feature romance novel collections with a variety of themes and from people with varying perspectives and collection goals.

Your romance novel collection is going to look very different from somebody else's, as you learned in this episode today with Rebecca.

The scope of what this project is looking for is anybody who has a curated selection of physical objects that can include romance novel books, art, ephemera, from any time period. Collections can also be romance novel adjacent such as romance comics, magazines, or movies. They can also be any size. The only requirement is that the collection have a coherent theme, however the collector defines it.

So if this sounds like you, I invite you to please submit your romance novel collection. You can find all the information on shelflovepodcast. substack. com. There is a link to a submission form that asks a bunch of questions and allows you to submit photos as well.

As you guys know, the romance community and the romance novel collecting community is both tight knit in some ways, and yet also sometimes fragmented on different platforms.

So there are people who are interested in this exact thing in lots of different places, and it's really helpful if you can spread the word about this [01:03:00] project to help bring people together.

-

Andrea Martucci: Thanks for spending time with me today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, or review on your favorite podcast app or tell a friend. Check out shelflovepodcast. com for transcripts and other resources. If you want regular written updates from Shelf Love, you can increasingly find me over at Substack, where I'm diving deep into romance publishing history, my thoughts on the current discourse, et cetera. I think the podcasts are better for conversation, whereas the Shelf Love Substack is a place where I'm developing my own thoughts more.

I have a post on there debunking romance being a billion dollar industry, or at least that we don't have the data to support that claim, that a lot of people seem to like. Not everything that I write about there makes its way back to the podcast feed for a variety of reasons, so if you haven't checked out the Substack yet, please check it out. You can find it at shelflovepodcast. substack. com. There is also a link to get there from my website.

These days, the social media platforms you are most likely to find me on Instagram and Bluesky. Thank you to Shelf Love's 20 a month Patreon supporters: Gail, Copper Dog Books, and Frederick Smith.

Hope you have a great day.