About

Honey & Wax Booksellers was founded by Heather O'Donnell.

I grew up in the library stacks and bookstore aisles of suburban Delaware. In 1989, I moved to New York City, where I studied English at Columbia, and held down a series of bookish jobs on the side: working the cash register at the Strand, shelving photobooks in the Avery Library, sifting the slush pile at Grand Street. While writing my doctoral dissertation in the Yale English department, I worked as a curatorial assistant at the Beinecke Library, where I developed an eye for rare books. From 2001 to 2004, I joined the Princeton Society of Fellows, teaching in the English and American Studies programs, and then left academia to pursue the rare book trade full-time. For seven years, I was a bookseller in the flagship New York gallery of Bauman Rare Books, dealing in a wide range of material, from incunabula to modern firsts, Shakespeare to Audubon to Churchill.

In the fall of 2011, I founded Honey & Wax Booksellers in Brooklyn, New York, devoting my time to the books I like best. You can send me a message at heather@honeyandwaxbooks.com.