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Word for a book collector5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() “Ever since, I’ve had an exciting time with books, bookshops, auction sales, etc., but never once have I seen or heard of a woman book-collector. Earle wrote an article for The American Book Collector called, “Pandora Buys a Book: A Collector in Search of an Author,” in which she lamented that she did not know of any other women book collectors. At best, so little can be remembered of all there is to learn about books and literature, that it is wise to settle in a small corner of this book-site and it is advisable to build well and slowly, rather than erect an entire village and try to cover the available acreage too rapidly.” “The field for bibliophiles is so large that it is difficult to choose the location where one hopes to build one frequently feels like a child selecting a candy from an enormous box of sweets. Marjorie Wiggin Prescott wrote Stray Thoughts of a Book Collector in 1932, in which she describes her approach to book collecting. Essays and memoirs by women bibliophiles can help us to understand their experiences and philosophies of book collecting in their own words. To get beyond general claims about women as the enemies of books, or bibliomania as a strictly masculine pursuit, it helps to go straight to the source. Now, I am not one to seek out – let alone brag about – being afflicted with a psychological disorder, but I do consider myself a serious collector.” It seems that men alone possess the necessary obsessive-compulsive behaviour to build important collections. “I was recently informed, in a friendly but insistent manner, that only men can be great book collectors. Certainly I can trace my attack to its deadly germ.” In his essay “ Mary Hyde and the Unending Pursuit,” Jerry Morris quotes collector Laura Barnes from a Rare Book Review article: Hill Burton defines first as a ‘human frailty,’ then as a ‘peculiar malady,’ which is the definition I accept. ![]() The culinary collector Elizabeth Robins Pennell wrote in My Cookery Books that “Dr. In Anatomy of Bibliomania, Holbrook Jackson claimed that “Book love is as masculine (although not as common) as growing a beard.” Thomas Dibdin wrote in The Bibliomania, or Book-Madness that bibliomania “has almost uniformly confined its attacks to the male sex, and among these, to people in the higher and middling classes.” Despite that perception, women have occasionally experienced the disease of bibliomania themselves. Those whose hobby was aesthetic or sentimental were stealth-collectors who simply disappeared from the historical radar.” …The only women collectors taken seriously by men were those who collected on men’s terms. “So pervasive was the conflation of men, market, and collecting that it has been difficult for most observers to even see that women were collecting, albeit in a style that was different from men. In Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America, Steven M. ![]() Therefore, I’m particularly interested in descriptions of book collecting by women themselves. Traditional definitions of book collecting have often neglected or even specifically excluded women. It can be difficult to define exactly what it means to be a book collector or what kind of activity counts as collecting. Du Guernier to Steele’s Ladies Library (vol 1, 1714). ![]()
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