Darby Ronning's Feminist Science Fiction Collection Wins Final Honey & Wax Prize

The winner of the 2026 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize is Darby Ronning for The Alldera Collection: Feminist Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century.

This is the last iteration of the annual prize which was launched in 2017 for American women book collectors aged 30 and younger.

Ronning, who also receives the $1,000 first prize, named her collection after Alldera, the heroine of Suzy McKee Charnas’s series The Holdfast Chronicles. Her collection documents the various ways that science fiction by and about women was published, marketed, and read in the 20th century, from pulp paperbacks featuring women in chains to self-published feminist fanzines.

While Ronning’s collection includes some of the most celebrated names in modern science fiction such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree, Jr., her main focus is on lesser-known writers: “I try not to spend more than ten dollars per title," she said, "a rule that, by design, sways the collection towards smaller names. These writers were veterinary radiologists and gymnastics instructors, physicians and mothers, and their backgrounds inform their storytelling. My collection aims to get at this entire ecosystem of imagining alternative worlds.”

The judges said that they were particularly impressed by Ronning’s developing focus on the popular reception of the novels she collects: 

“Science fiction in the 1970s had an active fan culture, and fans connected over reviews, art, and fiction circulated through zines. Janus, later Aurora, was perhaps the best-known feminist science fiction fanzine," said Ronning. "The authors themselves were part of this meta-commentary, submitting to fanzines and contributing to scholarship on the movement. These zines and works of criticism are now my chief collecting priority, because they are the format that best reveals feminist science fiction as a whole. I hunt for titles that are poorly documented and undigitized, keeping a keen eye on eBay. A recent find, New Moon, had ties to the publishers of Janus but took a more scholarly approach. I hope to acquire the other three issues.”

Five honorable mentions of $250 each were also awarded to:

• bookbinder and freelance bibliographer Juniper Couture for An Unusual Collection of Miniature Books Formed by a Lady who shares her collecting and bookbinding progress on social media as @thelilliputianlibrary
• graduate student in art history at Hunter College Maya Fell for her collection Armed Women Vernacular Photography comprising more than 100 photographs and pieces of print ephemera focusing on the typology of the armed woman in liberation movements globally
• Leila Louhaichy, manager of the Hauser & Wirth Gallery Bookshop in Chelsea, for Opening the Door for a Native New Yorker which originally focused on books about the city’s architectural and social history, then evolved into a new synaptic map of the city
• Instructional Services Coordinator in Special Collections at Ohio State Libraries Rose McCandless for The Book as Art and Commodity: Design Reform and Commercial Publishing, 1890–1915, exploring the way that the Arts & Crafts ideal of the printed book as an organic work of art trickled down into mass-produced books for the everyday reader
• Caitlin Paton, a medical coder and medical coding supervisor in Florida, for 'Let Me Be a Little Girl as Long as I Can:’ A Collection of Little Women, a collection of dozens of editions of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

"The response to this prize has exceeded all of our expectations. As we celebrate our tenth and final year, we want to thank all the collectors who shared their projects with us over the past decade. We learned more than we ever imagined from your ingenuity and dedication," said co-founders of the Honey & Wax Prize Heather O’Donnell of Honey & Wax Booksellers and Rebecca Romney of Type Punch Matrix.