Rebecca Romney, co-founder of rare book dealer Type Punch Matrix and a frequent guest on Pawn Stars, returns to our podcast Curious Objects this week. She has with her a mid-nineteenth-century abecebestiary, or calligraphic treatment of the alphabet with animal motifs, made by Englishman Charles Eduard Stuart . . .except that wasn’t really his name. Charles Manning Allen and his brother John, known as the Sobieski Stuarts, were eccentric book publishers who claimed to be descendants of Stuart claimant to the throne of England, Bonnie Prince Charlie. Volumes produced by the pair such as Romney’s abecedary, what she describes as “Book of Kells meets M. C. Escher meets Game of Thrones,” and bogus guides to Scottish tartans and clans found a ready audience in romantic Victorian England.
Rebecca Romney is the co-founder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in the Washington, DC, metro area. Since 2011 she has appeared as the rare book specialist on the History Channel’s show Pawn Stars; in 2019, she was featured in the documentary The Booksellers that focused on the rare book trade. Rebecca is the co-author of Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History with J. P. Romney and The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769–1999. Her current book, forthcoming from Simon and Schuster in 2025, is Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, which chronicles Romney’s efforts to build a book collection of Austen’s favorite women writers. Rebecca’s roles in the wider rare book community include co-founding the Honey and Wax Book Collecting Prize, serving on the Council of the Bibliographical Society of America and on the board of the the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, and teaching at the Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS-Minnesota).
