Welcome to Collecting Romance, a site where the worlds of popular romance fiction and rare book collecting meet!
IMPORTANT NOTE: This site is very much still in progress & incomplete! [For more on this, see below] But, there’s some great information here that’s ready to go & that I hope you find useful. Please enjoy looking around!
For as long as people have read romance novels, they’ve also collected them. Many romance readers have shelves filled with the complete works of their favorite author, or with the books that have touched them the most deeply, or with editions featuring their favorite cover art. Some even have closets and dedicated rooms with complete runs of numbered lines encompassing hundreds or even thousands of books.
It has only been recently, however, that the rare book trade and institutions with rare books and manuscripts collections have started paying serious attention to romance. At the same time, a growing number of romance readers are interested in collecting romance from a more deliberate, systematic angle that reveals and highlights important facets of the genre and how they intersect with history and culture. Or they simply want to curate personal collections in a way that give presence and importance to their unique romance-reading experiences and delights.
This website aims to be an evolving directory and guide for all types of romance collectors – from helping identify important editions and printings, to suggesting ways to find, value, and handle rare romances and understand the language of rare booksellers. As a directory, the site will provide organized links to content on other sites, blogs, and podcasts relevant to romance-collecting.
Whatever your level of interest or angle of approach in collecting romance, I hope you find this site useful! Feel free to send along any comments, questions, or suggestions for improving it.
