Meet the latest members of the ABAA.

 

Full Membership

Robin Beck, Primary Sources, Uncharted Americana

Born and raised in the foothills of western North Carolina, Rob Beck came to bookselling after twenty years of deep and focused collecting in a very narrow slice of the Americana pie. In 2017, he and his wife, Laoma, launched Primary Sources, Uncharted Americana, specializing in rare, unique, or unusual American paper, whether printed, manuscript, or visual. Primary Sources is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and operates primarily through catalogues, having issued seven to date. Rob received his BA in Political Science from UNC-Chapel Hill, his MA in Anthropology from the University of Alabama, and his PhD in Anthropology from Northwestern. He has been a professional archaeologist for more than thirty years and has worked in Bolivia, Peru, China, and much of the eastern United States. He continues in that career as a university professor, but he’s always on the hunt for exciting new material for Primary Sources.

 

Scott Givens, Crooked House Books & Paper 

Scott Givens founded his first bookstore in 2001 and opened a second in 2006. After twenty years in the retail trade, he sold his bookstores and started to specialize in more rare, collectible, and vintage books at Crooked House, although he still keeps a decent inventory of books priced under ten dollars just for fun.

Scott exhibits at book fairs along the West Coast, and is delving into printing single-subject “creative catalogs” with features not available in an electronic version. The Crooked House is open to the public one day a week. It has more Google reviews of the cats than of the books: Scott accepts his second-rate status.

 

Elizabeth Kelly-Griswold, Bluemango Books & Manuscripts 

Elizabeth was born and raised in Hornell, New York. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, she studied fisheries biology and worked for the Wisconsin and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (field research) and the Fisheries Cooperative Research Unit (lab research). After living in Wisconsin for 30 years, she relocated to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In 2011, she started attending local auctions and was drawn to early American Bibles with handwritten family history, so she began to reconnect them back to descendants (such as the Bible of a Revolutionary War surgeon). This was a springboard for her business, and in 2012, Bluemango Books and Manuscripts was launched, where she specializes in early American primary source manuscripts. ‘The story behind the story’ is the focal point of her work in researching people's lives found in manuscripts or tracing interesting provenance. Relying on research skills learned in the scientific field, she has a keen sense of discovery and curiosity. She has researched genealogy for over 45 years and has combined her love of history and people to bring new life to old account books! Reading first-hand experiences in primary sources as early journals or daybooks and discovering what was recorded, offers keen insights on how events affected people’s lives. She enjoys the hunt for fresh material and shedding light on overlooked items! Grandma to 6, mom of 3, vegetarian, and family historian, she often visits old burial grounds seeking gravestones of people being researched. She exhibits at Rare Book Fairs on the East Coast, where you can find "Pop's Traveling Rug." Her late father was a third-generation physician in Hornell, and the rug was always in his study, and he actually delivered her husband. "Do what you love, and love what you do!”

 

Rebecca Romney, Type Punch Matrix

Rebecca Romney was a bookseller and manager at Bauman Rare Books for eight years, then a principal at Honey & Wax Booksellers for three years before co-founding Type Punch Matrix in 2019. Since 2011 she has appeared as the rare book specialist on the History Channel’s show Pawn Stars;  she was also featured in the 2019 documentary The Booksellers. Rebecca is the author Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History (HarperCollins; with JP Romney) and The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769-1999; and she is the co-founder of the Honey & Wax Prize. Rebecca is on the Council of the Bibliographical Society of America, on the faculty of CABS-Minnesota, and has served on various Rare Book School committees since 2016. She is also a member of the Grolier Club, the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie (AIB), the American Antiquarian Society, and the Baker Street Irregulars. 

 

Joe van de Weghe, Dungeness Books

Joe van de Weghe is a second generation Antiquarian Bible seller. His father, Rob, began selling Bibles on his own website in 2006. Though Rob had an affinity for 19th century family Bibles, Joe preferes the older volumes. He is captivated by the history and cultural impact of Bibles printed before 1700. He also enjoys dabbling in theology books, fore-edge paintings, and other early printed books. Joe’s business, Dungeness Books, operates out of Sequim Washington on the beautiful Olympic Peninsula. Before selling books, Joe worked as an electrician, and then as a high school mathematics and computer science teacher. Joe joined his dad in the antiquarian book business in 2019. Attending CABS launched Joe deeper into the world of bookselling. He loves procuring new volumes and putting them into the hands of collectors.

 

Associate Membership

Spencer Hunt, Geographicus Rare Antique Maps

Spencer Hunt joined Geographicus Rare Antique Maps in March 2017 after meeting Kevin Brown at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. As a student of history, Spencer enjoys the wide range of material that he encounters at Geographicus, no matter whether it is a map, print, or other piece of ephemera. Each one tells its own story. He is proud to be a member of the ABAA. Spencer is a native of Blair, Nebraska, and attended the University of Nebraska and New York University before joining the team at Geographicus.

 

Annie Rowlenson, Eclectibles 

Annie Rowlenson joined Eclectibles in December 2021. She got her start in rare books through a seminar in the history of the book as an undergrad, and began working as an office assistant for the Rare Book School in Charlottesville not long after. She earned her MLIS with the intention of becoming a rare book librarian, but was soon wooed into the trade and fell in love with bookselling, which she was able to deepen further with the Apprenticeship Scheme offered by the ABA in the UK. Her interests include everything from gothic novels and gender studies to embroidered bindings, early film advertising ephemera, and pulpy romance novels. She collects non-English language editions of Wuthering Heights, lives in Guilford, Connecticut with her husband and two cats.

 

Samuel (Sam) Wood, DeWolfe and Wood 

Sam Wood was born and raised in southern Maine. Being the son of a book dealer, Frank Wood, Sam has been in and around the book business for most of his life. This does not mean that he has read many books so, please, do not ask him about the “classics.” Sam is interested in music, counter culture, communal groups, spiritualism, true crime, and anything bizarre or interesting. He currently works in the book shop that his father co-owns with Scott DeWolfe, DeWolfe and Wood Books & Antiques, in Alfred, Maine. Sam enjoys the finer things in life like long walks along the highway, the champagne of beers, hockey fights, and mini-golf. He prefers his soup cold and his sushi cooked. Sam is excited to be an associate within the ABAA and looks forward to a long, arduous, and self-loathing career in the book business. Sam, usually, prefers the movie to the book.

 

Other Membership Changes:

 

Joint Full Membership

Mara Fath & Steven Hill, Blank Verso Books 

Mara was a free range child growing up in Mill Valley, California. Her father was the Principal Clarinet of the San Francisco Symphony and Opera, her mother a special education teacher and activist. Mara started playing the piano at age three and read music before books. In 5th grade she discovered book commerce when she sold books she bought at the local library sale for a nice profit. An art major in college she made illuminated manuscripts out of porcelain, and fashioned books into pedestals. Art and books have always been a central theme in her life. Steven has been involved with books in various ways over many years, starting as an Assistant Editor at what was G.P. Putnam's Sons in NYC, evolving into financial analysis of publishing companies for Investment Banking firms, etc. Always the book collector, he eventually became a bookseller and formerly owned an antiquarian bookstore in San Francisco. Mara and Steven met decades ago at a bookstore, and have been together ever since, examining, researching, cataloging, and buying and selling a huge range of books and ephemera. Today, they still love each other and love selling books.

 

Joshua Niesse & Megan Bell, Underground Books 

Underground Books is an online rare bookshop as well as a brick and mortar general bookstore of the same name in downtown Carrollton, Georgia, along with Hills & Hamlets Bookshop in Serenbe. Co-owners Josh Niesse and Megan Bell met in 2011, just 10 days after Josh opened the doors of Underground Books, literally underground, several steps below street level in a 100-year-old basement in historic downtown Carrollton. Megan, an English student at the local university, walked in, fell down the rabbit hole, and never left! They married in May 2014, under the book arch that now resides at the bookshop. Both are proud alumni of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar and Megan additionally of Rare Book School and the ABAA Women’s Initiative Mentorship Program. They specialize in decorative publisher's cloth bindings; fairy tales, folklore, and mythology; popular science and natural history; the occult; academic work; fine press books; and more.

 

Emeritus Status 

Thomas (Tom) Nicely, Leaves of Grass Rare Books 

Elisabeth Burdon, Old Imprints

John Hood, J. Hood, Booksellers Inc.

 

Reinstatement

James M. (Jim) Strawn, Smythe Books LLC.

 

You can view an index of the members of the ABAA, search by speciality, and find members who offer appraisal services, here: https://www.abaa.org/booksellers...