Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC. She is the rare books specialist on the History Channel’s show "Pawn Stars" and the cofounder of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. She is a generalist rare book dealer, handling works in all fields, from first editions of Jane Austen to science fiction paperbacks.

Romney is the author of PRINTER’S ERROR: Irreverent Stories from Book History (with JP Romney) and THE ROMANCE NOVEL IN ENGLISH: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769­–1999. Her work as a bookseller or writer has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Variety, The Paris Review and more. In 2019, she was featured in the documentary on the rare book trade, The Booksellers. She is on the Board of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) and the faculty of the Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS-Minnesota).

Books by Rebecca Romney

Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend

by Rebecca Romney - Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence and always allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more. But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers --- and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney --- despite her training --- ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?