History’s Caretaker

The narrative that unfolds across a book’s pages is only a small portion of its tale. Investigating the rest—who published it, who read it, who loved it, who preserved it—is the passion of Rebecca Romney, a co-founder of the rare book company Type Punch Matrix. Her career as a book detective is the focus of Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, in which she details her quest to find and preserve works by the female writers who inspired Austen but faded from the canon themselves. Along the way, Romney asks readers to consider why some artists become lauded while others, equally gifted, are forgotten—and argues that collecting what you love, whatever that may be, might be more powerfully protective than you think.

How did you get into the rare book trade?
I grew up in a reading family—a family of scientists, so we read a lot of science fiction. Books were how we passed our time, how the family would connect. It was an environment I was lucky enough to take for granted and one that ended up being critical for my getting into the rare book trade. There’s no degree to do what I do. Book collecting is about handling books as historical artifacts, so it’s all senses-based, experience-based. The only way to learn is by doing. At my first job, they weren’t looking for people with rare book knowledge—just people who were bookish. They were already planning to teach me about rare books; they didn’t want to have to teach me about Charles Dickens, too.

What led you to become a collector yourself?
It happened by accident. I’d acquired two science fiction books, one by Ursula K. Le Guin, that I’d planned to sell. But I realized that the price I could ask for was nowhere near the value they had to me personally. Books can be very heavy objects for us, symbolically and emotionally. Their value has nothing to do with the leather or the cost of the paper; it’s not even necessarily the text on its own. It’s the story of the book and what the book represents to you. One book in what I now call my “autobiographical collection” is Bunnicula, which I loved in like, third grade. I now have a first edition shelved right next to my childhood copy, a tattered paperback. It’s destroyed; it has zero marketplace value. But if there was a fire in my house, which copy am I grabbing? It’s not the first edition.

You also collect romance novels, although you write that it’s a genre you once disliked. What changed your mind?
My resistance to romance was based in part on my growing up in a very conservative environment, which imposed on me that being a wife was the primary value I could have. In romance, the “happy ending” traditionally meant marriage, so I wasn’t interested in books pressing a theme on me that I was already resisting. The other reason was flat-out stereotyping: I had certain ideas in my head about what romance novels were—that they were formulaic, that they weren’t worth reading. But I was making assumptions without evidence, and once I got into romance, I realized it was much richer and more fascinating than I’d thought. Snobbery is very rarely a benefit to you; openness and excitement and curiosity are.

Apart from personal enjoyment, what motivates your collecting?
When people look at my collections, whether it’s romance or Jane Austen, I hope they’ll see that my priority is giving women credit where credit is due. The rare book world is heavily masculine in its perspective; 80 percent of owners in my trade organization are men. It’s not that this world is actively hostile to romance. But if you’re not reading romance novels, if you don’t think they’re for you, then you won’t necessarily see their value. I think of my collection as an intervention to counter not hostility but apathy.

You’ve described collecting as a way of preserving history. Why?
Things don’t get preserved for people to study, write about, and read about unless there’s someone collecting them. It’s easy to look at a book from the 18th century and recognize its importance. It’s harder, in your own time, to recognize what people might care about in a hundred years and think, I should save this. But if you have something that you feel very strongly about, then you have the agency to intervene and say This matters to me, so I’m going to be the one who ensures it’s preserved.

So much, including most books, can be found online. So why collect physical versions?
We still haven’t solved the internet’s long-term archiving problem, and until that’s the case, it’s a mistake to rely solely on it. I’m in book history, so I’m not thinking in terms of the next five or 10 years; I’m talking hundreds. We don’t know what’s going to be accessible on the internet a hundred years from now. Think about video games: That’s a medium that we’ve kind of taken for granted, in part because it still feels so new. But already our choices are being limited by built-in obsolescence, as new systems don’t play old cartridges. Over time, that narrows what games people have access to. When you look back on video game history, there are early games that were so important, so impactful, that most people won’t ever know about.

Isn’t preserving history a job for museums?
Most institutions were founded on some great collector’s private library. The seed of what became the British Library, for example, was the collection of a man named Robert Cotton. One of the books he acquired was a manuscript of Beowulf—what’s now the only surviving copy. If Cotton hadn’t preserved it, we would no longer have a monument of old English. There’s a symbiotic relationship between sellers, institutions, and collectors all working toward a common goal. If we want to preserve a record of our civilization that reflects its richness, no one person, no one institution, can do it alone.