Book collectors are stuffy old men. Everyone knows that. Well, maybe not everyone. Honey & Wax Booksellers has announced the ninth annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. It is awarded to women book collectors age 30 or younger. Such persons may not be supposed to exist, but every year, winners come forward. Their collections are always unique and intriguing, something that fits the interests and personality of the collector.
The deadline for filing is July 1. The form asks you to write a brief essay concerning your collection and various things about it. If you have never tried to describe your collection and goals before, you may come away with a better understanding of what you have accomplished. In that case, everyone's a winner, but one collector will also receive a $1,000 prize as a bonus.
We will now turn this article over top Honey & Wax for a better description of the collecting prize and a list of past winners.
“We are delighted to announce the ninth annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize, a cash award of $1000 for an outstanding book collection built by a woman aged 30 or younger, anywhere in the United States.
"The prize was founded in 2017 by two antiquarian booksellers, Heather O’Donnell of Honey & Wax Booksellers and Rebecca Romney of Type Punch Matrix. We observed that the women who regularly bought books from us were less likely to call themselves“collectors” than the men, even when those women had spent years passionately collecting books. And a quick online image search for “book collector” brought up page after page of older men. By creating a platform that celebrates and shares innovative collections created by young women, and providing a financial incentive to those collectors as they work, we aim to encourage a new generation of women collectors.
“The contest is open to women book collectors in the United States, aged 30 or younger. The winning collection must have been started by the contestant, and all items in the collection must be owned by her. 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. The winning collection will be more than a reading list of favorite texts: it will be a unique group of printed or manuscript objects, creatively chosen to shine light on one another.
"Collections are judged not on their size or their market value, but on their originality and their success in illuminating their chosen subjects."
2017 winner, librarian Jessica Kahan Hubbard, for Romance Novels of the Jazz Age and Depression Eras: “Winning the Honey & Wax Prize re-affirmed my confidence in how I viewed myself within the rare book community.”
2018 winner, graduate student Jessica Jordan, for Collecting Leo and Diane Dillon: Six Decades of Unparalleled Illustration: “Even though I was drawn to rare bookstores and events, I wasn’t sure I belonged in that space. . . . just applying for the Honey & Wax Prize helped me see myself as a collector.”
2019 winner, cartoonist Emily Forster, for Crimes of Passion: Collecting Fan-made Comics and Doujinshi: “I definitely thought of myself as a collector before (I had way too many books not to!) but due to the nature of my collection, I hadn’t considered it could be of much interest to other book collectors.”
2020 winner, graduate student Miriam Borden, for Building a Nation of Little Readers: Twentieth Century Yiddish Primers and Workbooks for Children: “Book history as a field is very male-dominated, it’s very white, it’s very old-school in many ways, and it was really exciting for me to see a competition that was interested in highlighting the work of younger women who were doing this.”
2021 winner, astrophysicist Margaret Landis, for Maria Mitchell Through Time: “Having the prize deadline made me sit down and think about the most interesting things I’d found each year, and refine my focus.”
2022 winner, graduate student Melanie Shi, for East of France, West of Russia: Cold War Europe and the Chinese Book: “Thinking of myself as a collector has completely changed the way I think about books and publishing history, about the irreproducibility of specific copies.”
2023 winner, tattoo artist Auroura Morgan, for Hybrid Botanicals: A Modern Tattoo Artist’s Reference Collection: “I didn’t consider myself a book collector until I heard about the contest and thought, ‘that’s me, I want to participate!’ Finding a community with shared interest in books has been a surprising and delightful experience.”
2024 winner, national security analyst Elena Wicker, for Military Mania: A Collection of U.S. Military Dictionaries from 1776 to Today: “The process of applying for (and then winning) the prize gave me a much greater appreciation of my books as a collection and affirmed my identity as a collector.”
Explore the prize-winning submissions from previous years, and apply here: www.honeyandwaxbooks.com/prize.php. The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2025. This year’s winner will be announced in September.
The 2025 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize is made possible through the generous sponsorship of Biblio, Bibliopolis, The Caxton Club, Christie’s, and Ellen A. Michelson.
