The short version.
I work with books, paper, & people. As of July 2025, I am the Curator of the Mortimer Rare Book Collection at Smith College. A native New Yorker, I am based in Connecticut River Valley in Shutesbury, MA.
A librarian and curator by training and disposition, I have worked in libraries and with private collections of rare materials in New York City and elsewhere since 2008. The Harry Ransom Center, Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Bibliographical Society of the UK have supported by research and training with fellowships. I've published in Printing History, Atlas Obscura, the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, and in Information: A Historical Companion. In 2024, I co-taught the CalRBS Course, “The Celluloid Paper Trail” with Kevin Johnson. My article, "Women's Work in Film Production & The Documents of Film History" is forthcoming in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies in September 2025.
Last but not least, I collect The Whole Earth Catalog and its offspring: books made by and for people living on communes and engaged in the back to the land movement during the last quarter of the 20th century.
A little bit more.
I graduated from Middlebury College with a BA in the History of Art and Architecture in 2007, and hold an MLIS from the Palmer School of Information Science with a concentration in rare book librarianship. From 2008 to 2016 I worked at Columbia University's Avery Art & Architectural Library's Classics Collection and then at the New York Society Library (NYSL) as Special Collections Librarian. At the NYSL I led a project to redesign and launch City Readers, a digital humanities tool for the study of reading and readers at the Library, New York City's oldest cultural institution (founded in 1754).
In 2016 I left to Society Library and began working as a consultant to institutional and private collections, and it was then that I began working with Robert M. Rubin and his collection of screenplays and cinema paper. I worked closely with Mr. Rubin until 2023, when my husband and fellow librarian, Steve McGuirl, took over my role in acquiring, describing, and preserving materials in the collection.
From 2018 to 2025 I served as the first full-time Executive Director of the Bibliographical Society of America, the oldest scholarly society in North America dedicated to the study of books and manuscripts as physical objects. In this role I coordinated the work of scores of volunteers on the Council and committees, developing and leading in alignment with a labor ethic of compassionate accountability. During my tenure at the BSA, we successfully expanded our membership and programmatic reach, added new fellowship awards, expanded the annual meeting and Bibliography Week program, and established the Margaret B. Stillwell Legacy Society.
My research focuses on the labor of the secretaries and typists who produced and edited screenplays in 20th century Hollywood movie studios. I also collect Whole Earth Catalogs and what I call its "offspring" – books put together following instructions printed in the last Catalog, or otherwise published by and for people living in rural areas and on communes in the latter half of the 20th century.
