Alexandra E. LaGrand Wins 2025 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize

Alexandra E. LaGrand has won the 2025 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize for her archive documenting Shakespearean breeches actresses over the long 19th century.

The annual prize, which rewards American women book collectors aged 30 years and younger, was established in 2017 by Honey & Wax Booksellers to expand the popular perception of who book collectors are and can be.

Alexandra E. LaGrand, aged 29, is a doctoral candidate at Texas A&M University and won the $1,000 first prize for her Archiving the Shakespearean Breeches Actress. LaGrand’s research on the 19th century British stage led to her interest in actresses in breeches roles, performances in which a woman plays a part originally written for a man, as Sarah Bernhardt did when she starred as Hamlet.

LaGrand’s winning collection brings together almost 40 printed and manuscript artifacts that document the subject including books, letters, signatures, playbills, prints, a theatrical scrapbook, a prompt book from an 1878 production of Macbeth featuring “Miss Lewis” as Donalbain, and a core collection devoted to Charlotte Cushman, the first internationally renowned American actress, who was celebrated for her breeches roles. 

“I wanted to collect items that Cushman had touched in order to closely feel the history of her career," she said. "This manifested through collecting ephemeral items such as a manuscript letter by her and a signature card, but also books, including an 1868 first edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s New England Tragedies which bears her inscription to one of her lovers. As I collected more Cushman items, I grew more ambitious, seeking out wholly unique and thus more special and valuable items that documented her career, such as a grangerized first edition copy of Emma Stebbins’s 1878 biography of Cushman, featuring extra illustrations and materials tipped in throughout, an undated playbill featuring Cushman in the role of Romeo at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, and even a carte-de-visite photograph portrait of her costumed in the role of Romeo.”

LaGrand has created a public database Points Like A Man to compile historical records of gender fluid Shakespearean performance. 

Five honorable mentions were also made, each winning $250: 

* Ashleigh McConnell, 29, a recent master’s graduate in Emergency Management for My Journey with Jane: A Tale of Discovery and the Birth of a Collector for which she has collected more than 300 editions and variants of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, with the goal of owning a Jane Eyre edition from every year from 1847 to the present.

* Nat McGartland, 30, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland and instructor at UMD BookLab, for Quhare scant wes Scottis: A Political History of the Scots Language. McGartland collects books that document Scots as a language of its own rather than simply a regional dialect of English, and he collection includes dictionaries, glossaries, and appendices in Scots, as well as landmark publications like the 1790 first printed edition of The Brus, the oldest work in Scots, and Gawin Douglas’s Scots translation of the Aeneid, which predates the first English translation.  

* Bella Savignano, 24, , an administrator at Swann Galleries in New York City, for Flashbang: Amplifying a Revisionist History of Glam Rock. Savignano’s collection is a kaleidoscopic picture of the New York glam rock scene, featuring magazines, posters, concert tickets, and a manila folder of clippings about the New York Dolls collected by a contemporary fan. 

* Amalia V., 29, a professional dominatrix (and self-described “archivatrix”) in New York City, for Collecting Sex, a collection of more than 150 books, magazines, zines, and pulps “at the intersection of one or more of the following categories: sex work, queer BDSM, and Female Domination” and often printed and distributed outside mainstream publishing channels.

* Jaeden Yoshikawa, 30, of Mankato, Minnesota, a professional archivist, for A Trip Down Lover’s Lane: A Collection of Lover’s Real Photo Post Cards. Yoshikawa collects scenic ephemera depicting local 'lover’s' tourist sites (such as Lover’s Lanes, Lover’s Leaps, Lover’s Retreats), aiming to explore “what defines a space for lovers, and how the histories and legends tied to these places might offer deeper insight into human relationships and sexuality.”  Yoshikawa focuses primarily on real photo post cards, “small-batch” postcards created directly by vernacular photographers from film negatives, rather than mass-produced printed images. The images often feature people known to the photographers.