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.

Aaron Beckwith

Aaron Beckwith wandered into Capitol Hill Books in 2004 and wrestled a shelving gig out of the curmudgeonly owner. For the next fourteen years he and a few friends schemed on how to raise money to buy the store when the owner retired. Aaron worked as a mover (scheme #3)  for almost a decade until he and his business partners had enough money to buy the store in 2018. If Aaron has a specialty, it's running a brick and mortar bookshop, buying rare book collections, and over-committing to book fairs.

Cheryl Beredo

Cheryl Beredo is Director of Collections and Chief Curator at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Previously, she served as a curator and later an associate director at the Schomburg Center, New York Public Library, and director at the Kheel Center, Cornell University. She is a member of the Bibliographical Society of America, Grolier Club, and American Antiquarian Society. She currently serves on the board of Rare Book School.

Brian Cassidy

Brian Cassidy has been a bookseller in one form or another since 1994. After graduating from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and working in a series of independent bookshops, he launched Brian Cassidy Bookseller in 2004, specializing in the Beats, the Mimeo Revolution, and countercultural movements. With Rebecca Romney, he co-founded Type Punch Matrix in 2019, and in 2020 BCB officially joined TPM.

Brian first joined the faculty of CABS in 2014, and has returned in 2026 to pick up again as a visiting faculty member of the CABS-Minnesota Antiquarian Book Seminar. He also teaches a class on the history and identification of 20th century duplicating technologies for Rare Book School, a subject on which he has lectured at NYU, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and elsewhere. His work as a bookseller has been featured in many publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Barron's,The Guardian, The Pitchfork Review, and TheVillageVoice, where Richard Hell once described him as "an enthusiastic, soulful dealer." His request is that be put that on his tombstone.

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.

Kevin Johnson

Kevin Johnson, proprietor of Royal Books, is a guest instructor for 2026. Kevin has been a seller and appraiser of rare books and archives for nearly 30 years. His firm specializes in rare books and paper relating to archives, film ephemera, literature, photography, and the arts. 

He has lectured and taught master class courses on the subject of film script identification at Yale University, UCLA, The University of Virginia Rare Book School, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles (AMPAS).  He has authored two books on the first edition sources for American film noir, The Dark Page (1940-1949) and the The Dark Page II (1950-1965), and most recently The Celluloid Paper Trail: Identification and Description of Twentieth Century Film Scripts, all published by Oak Knoll Press.

Kevin taught at and directed the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar from 2007 to 2012.

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.

Heather O'Donnell

Heather O’Donnell has been a rare book dealer for over twenty years. In 2011, she founded Honey & Wax Booksellers, specializing in literary and print history, with a focus on books that combine genres, disciplines, and audiences in surprising ways. In 2016, she and Rebecca Romney established the annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize for young women collectors. Heather is featured in The Booksellers, the 2019 documentary on the New York book trade, and served on the ABAA Board of Governors from 2018 to 2022. She is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA), the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA), the Grolier Club, the Caxton Club, and the American Antiquarian Society. She is a graduate of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (class of 2012) and Rare Book School. Heather currently serves on the faculty and board of CABS-Minnesota, the BSA Council, the ABAA Gender Equity Initiative and Mentorship Program, and the Yale Library Associates Trustees.

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 Jane Austen's Bookshelf (Simon & Schuster, 2025). Rebecca runs the Honey & Wax Prize with Heather O'Donnell, is on the Council of the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA), and on the Board of Governors of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of American (ABAA). She also serves on committees for Rare Book School and the Grolier Club, and is a member of the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie (AIB), the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), and the Baker Street Irregulars (BSI).

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

Seminar Director 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.