Women and Books

 

    I just completed yet another post about another guy with a library. Among the others you will find discussions of the books held by Stalin, Twain, Wilde, Gorey and Professor Macksey. There is even one titled, "Boys With Books" that deals with the book collecting of Colin Wilson and, Norman Mailer whose relationships with women were 'problematic', to say the least. 
  If there are any female readers of MM, they are likely to be shouting, genug shoyn, or, if not and they have happened upon it just now, "enough already." So, what about women and their libraries?
  As a male, under current rules, it is not appropriate for me to discuss a female subject, so I will keep this short and, let's face it, women are perfectly capable of finding on their own such stuff as is now presented.
  There is a Brooklyn bookseller run be women called Honey & Wax. If you go to their website today, they may be slow to respond since some are attending the annual Antiquarian Book Seminar in Minnesota. 
   Every year Honey & Wax sponsors a contest for young women book collectors. Size doesn't matter and,
 "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, publisher, 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 chosen group of printed or manuscript objects, creatively assembled, that shine light on one another. Collections will not be judged on their size or their market value, but on their originality and their success in illuminating their chosen subjects." 
[I should mention that their definition of 'women' is an inclusive one and all of this is found on the H&W website."]
   The winners are interesting as the 2023 one indicates. It was Auroura Morgan's. “Hybrid Botanicals: A Modern Tattoo Artist’s Reference Collection.”
   I have probably appropriated enough, or even too much, but you may be wondering about the image at the top. It is an "American Woman's Questionnaire Scarf" and it is among the ephemera for sale at Honey & Wax. It could be yours for $85 (US).
Sources (and a tiny bit of CANCON):
  The Honey & Wax website is enough, but the attached article is interesting and it shows that one of the past winners of the H&W contest was a graduate student at the University of Toronto. It was for her collection of Yiddish children's books and she would surely know the meaning of genug shoyn. See: "Six Young Women With Prizewinning Book Collections," The Paris Review, Sept. 18, 2020.