Celebrate the 250th Anniversary of Jane Austen with an exhibit and special event!
Kelvin Smith Library is pleased to host Rebecca Romney, rare book dealer and author on April 22, 2025 at 4pm in the Freedman Center and via livestream. Rebecca will give a presentation based on her recently-released book entitled Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend.
Register for the event and find the livestream link here.
Jane Austen's Library Special Collections Exhibit at Kelvin Smith Library
In addition to this event, the Special Collections department of Kelvin Smith Library has an exhibition entitled Jane Austen's Library, featuring 18th and 19th century books which inspired her writing. These early editions are drawn from the library's extensive rare book collection and have been curated to accompany and enhance the event. The exhibit is open weekdays from 10am - 4pm, February 4th through May 30 in the Special Collections reading room on the 2nd floor of KSL, and will be open both before and after Rebecca Romney's talk.
Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer, author, and appraiser. She is the co-founder of Type Punch Matrix, a Washington DC-area rare book firm specializing in pivotal works from every field. The author of several books, her latest is Jane Austen’s Bookshelf. 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. 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.