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Women and Books in Special Collections

Guide to resources related to women involved in book selling, printing, collecting, binding, designing, and librarianship in Smith College Special Collections.

Feminist and Women-owned Bookstores

Corner building viewed from across the street with red sign and red banner that both say Womanbooks
Womanbooks: A Bookstore for Women, West 92nd St., New York City, circa 1982. Photograph by Phyllis Birkby. Phyllis Birkby Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, SSC-MS-00283. Record ID 3780.

Feminist and women-owned bookstores are represented in multiple collections in Smith College Special Collections. This list is intended to help you start your research, but is not comprehensive.

Collections and books are briefly described below. For more extensive information for archival collections, read the "Scope and Contents" and the "Biographical / Historical" notes in the finding aid. For books, read the "Notes" section in the catalog record.

 

Joan E. Biren papers

SSC-MS-00587

Joan E. Biren, known as JEB, is a filmmaker, photographer, and lesbian activist who has been professionally known for documenting lesbian lives and communities since the 1970s. She became particularly well known in the 1980s for her slideshow and historical lecture affectionately known as The Dyke Show, with which she toured extensively. This collection includes JEB’s personal and professional records, and is rich in documentation of her photography and filmmaking. Photographs and negatives include images of bookstores including: Oscar Wilde Bookstore Collective, Lammas, Toronto Women’s Bookstore, A Woman’s Place, Old Wives Tales, Amazon (not the corporation); and Charis Bookstore. Book of interest in the collection: The Feminist Bookstore Movement, by Kristen Hogan, 2016

Alison Bechdel papers

SSC-MS-00633

Alison Bechdel is a lesbian cartoonist best known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. The collection documents her illustrative and written works. It includes extensive drafts, drawings, and notes (referred to by Bechdel as sketches) that formed the basis for her comics from the mid-1980s onwards. Other material includes business correspondence, character and topic development files, manuscript edits, fan mail, interviews, reviews, publicity materials, and merchandise. Items of interest:

Mary Mackey papers

SSC-MS-00758

The collection contains the literary papers of Mary Mackey, feminist novelist and poet. Literary papers including multiple drafts, galleys, published works, correspondence, publicity, interviews, and reviews. Of particular interest is the presence of feminist bookstore ephemera throughout the collection.

Dyke TV records

SSC-MS-00656
Items of interest:

Mary Daly papers

SSC-MS-00637
Mary Daly (1928-2010) was a radical feminist philosopher, author, lecturer, and professor of religious and women's studies. This collection includes records of her personal and professional life. Of interest are her files on:

Hampshire Bookshop records

MRBC-MS-00025

The collection contains correspondence from many of the authors the Bookshop sponsored in its lecture series and friends of the store including Martha Gilbert Bianchi, Grace Coolidge, Elizabeth A. Drew, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Christopher Morley, Elizabeth Morrow and Hugh Walpole. There are photographs of the store and the authors, ephemera, book and gift catalogs and a file of The Book Scorpion, a publication that it issued periodically.
There are scrapbooks containing newspaper and magazine clippings about the store and its advertisements. Also a file of magazine articles on the store. There is a bound manuscript entitled "After ten years : stray pages of recollections, compiled by the present staff of the Hampshire Bookshop, " Northampton, Mass., 1926.

Marion Elza Dodd papers

CA-MS-00055
Alumnae, founder of the Hampshire Book Shop, writer, professor, History and Art of the Book. Collection contains biographical materials, photographs, correspondence, documents related to the Hampshire Bookshop (predecessor to the Grecourt Bookstore), and writings.

Phyllis Birkby papers

SSC-MS-00283
Architect; film maker; lesbian activist; feminist; founder, Women's School of Planning and Architecture; and professor. The Birkby papers include her own documentation of women's activities through various forms of documentation. Materials include films, photographs, journals, writings, and correspondence with several notable feminists. Of particular interest is the subject file on Bookstores, 1977, 1983, undated and photographs throughout the collection.

Molly Malone Cook papers

SSC-MS-00595
The collection consists of photographic prints by professional photographers Molly Malone Cook, Ken Heyman, Berenice Abbott, Louis H. Draper, Rollie McKenna, Barbara Morgan, and unidentified photographers. Subject of the photographs include some well known artists and authors (Walter Evans, Lorraine Hansberry, Henry Geldzahler, Norman Mailer, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W. Eugene Smith, and others), as well as city and nature scenes, and images of ordinary people in the U.S. and abroad. Cook owned the East End Bookshop and there are pictures of VII Paperback Books bookstore in the collection.

Holliday Bookshop collection

MRBC-MS-00009

Husband and wife co-owners of a bookshop in New York City that initially specialized in importing English books, as well as offering unusual and rare books, especially first editions of contemporary authors and private press books. Contains book catalogues, correspondence, writings, publicity, and photographs.