Faculty
Lorne Bair
Lorne Bair grew up in Spain, South America, and on a commune in West Virginia before leaving home at sixteen for a brief stint in the U.S. Coast Guard, followed by degrees in Biology, English Literature and Creative Writing at Virginia Tech and the University of Maryland. He began his bookselling career in the mid-1990s in Oregon, scouting for Powell's Books in Portland and answering queries in the old Bookman's Weekly. He ran an open shop in Winchester, Virginia, from 1996 until 2002, when he abandoned general bookselling to pursue his current specialty in American Radical History and Social Movements. He is a former board member of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, and lives in Winchester, Virginia with his partner, Lee Ann Dransfield, and a variable quantity of cats.
Helene Golay
Hélène Golay started working with rare books at the Cushing Memorial Library & Archives at Texas A&M University in 2010. She transitioned to the trade two years later and has been a bookseller in Minnesota, New York, Virginia, and Washington, DC, where she is now an owner of Capitol Hill Books and a member of the ABAA.
Maria Lin
Maria Lin had brief stints in archives work (obtaining her MLIS) and web development before landing at Rulon-Miller Books in 2013, where she has been ever since. On top of cataloging and selling books, she runs the "IT department" for the company and the Seminar.
Kathy Lindeman
Kathy Lindeman as CABS Coordinator has handled registration, communication with interested parties, , behind the scenes organization and financial accounting for the Antiquarian Book Seminar since 1998. Making everything run smoothly is her main priority and challenge! She is also a non-voting member on the ABSF Board as Executive Director. Other jobs include Coordinator for the Colorado College Faculty Club; former Staff Assistant for the CC Economics and Business Department, and Pikes Peak Regional Coordinator for the National History Day Competition. Kathy has worked in University Libraries at Cornell University in Ithaca and at CU Boulder and lives with her husband Ted, a retired Colorado College Emeritus Chemistry Professor in Colorado Springs.
Amir Naghib
Amir Naghib has been, variously, a collector, a book scout, and a manager of new bookshops prior to his career in rare books. After attending CABS in 2010, he established Captain Ahab's Rare Books in Miami, FL, and moved the business to the Shenandoah Valley in 2012, where he operates the business from home. Captain Ahab's Rare Books specializes in 19th-20th century literature, genre fiction, association copies, and related manuscripts, with occasional forays into film and music. Amir obtained an MLS from the University of South Florida in 2012, the same year he established the literature department at Lorne Bair Rare Books, where he continues to work in conjunction with his own business.
Heather O'Donnell
Heather O’Donnell studied literature at Columbia and Yale, working with rare books and manuscripts on the side, throughout the 1990s. From 2001 to 2004, she was a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows, then left academia to pursue the book trade full-time at Bauman Rare Books. In 2011, Heather launched Honey & Wax Booksellers, specializing in literary and print history. With Rebecca Romney, she runs the annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize for young women collectors, as featured in the 2019 documentary The Booksellers. Heather served on the ABAA Board of Governors from 2018 to 2022, and currently serves on the faculty and board of CABS-Minnesota, the ABAA Gender Equity Initiative, the Nominating Committee of the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Yale Library Associates Trustees.
Katherine Reagan
Katherine Reagan is Ernest Stern ‘56 Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts and Assistant Director for Collections, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University, where she has worked since 1997. A Bay Area native, her undergraduate degree is from the University of California at Berkeley and her Master’s degree is from Columbia University, where she was a member of the last graduating class of the Rare Book Program at Columbia’s School of Library Service. Prior to working at Cornell, she worked as a reference librarian at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. She serves on the faculty of Rare Book School, and was Chair of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of ACRL (a division of the American Library Association) in 2005–06.
Rebecca Romney
Rebecca Romney was a bookseller and manager at Bauman Rare Books, then a principal at Honey & Wax Booksellers before co-founding Type Punch Matrix with Brian Cassidy in 2019. She is the rare book specialist on the HISTORY Channel’s show Pawn Stars and was featured in the documentary The Booksellers. She is the author of Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History (HarperCollins; with JP Romney), The Romance Novel in English: A Survey in Rare Books, 1769-1999 (documenting a collection now housed at the Lilly Library), and the forthcoming Jane Austen's Bookshelf (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Rebecca runs the Honey & Wax Prize with Heather O'Donnell, is on the Council of the Bibliographical Society of America, serves on committees for Rare Book School and the Grolier Club, and is a member of the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie and the Baker Street Irregulars.
Robert Rulon-Miller, Jr.
Robert Rulon-Miller, Jr. Rob began selling books as a teenager in 1969 in his family rare book business in Bristol, Rhode Island. After completing his education he entered the trade full time in 1977 and in 1982 started Rulon-Miller Books in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He considers himself a generalist bookseller, selling rare, fine and interesting books, manuscripts, and ephemera in many fields, with concentrations in language books (dictionaries, grammars, etc.), fine and unusual printing, exotic imprints, exploration and maritime material, and general Americana. He also appraises and sells archival material on a regular basis. He became a member of the ABAA in 1977. He is a member of the Grolier Club, the American Antiquarian Society, and L’Association Internationale de Bibliophile, as well as other related organizations, local, national, and international.
Garrett Scott
Garrett Scott got his first job working with rare books as a student assistant at Stanford University Special Collections in 1990. In 1991, he took a job at the Brick Row Book Shop in San Francisco. Garrett moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1998 and went into business as Garrett Scott, Bookseller. He appeared as the specialty dealer at CABS in 2015 and joined the CABS faculty in 2016.
Garrett specializes in the printed and written residue of weird old America. He has served on the Board of Governors of the ABAA and, from 2012 to 2022, served on the ABAA Security Committee. He is also a moderator emeritus of the Exlibris mailing list.
