Bright Young Collectors | January 2025 | Nate Pedersen

Book Collector Donna Marie Sanders on 19th and Early 20th Century Classics

Donna Marie Saunders

Our Bright Young Collectors series continues today with Donna Marie Sanders, an Honorable Mention in the 2024 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize for women collectors age 30 and younger.

Where are you from / where do you live?
I’m a New Yorker through and through! Born and raised on Long Island, I spent the last five years in Manhattan as an undergrad and graduate student. I now commute back and forth between the Island and the city.

What did you study at University? What do you do now for an occupation?
I graduated from Columbia University in 2023 as a double major in English and European Intellectual History. My undergraduate senior thesis examined Christian symbolism and moments of theodicy in the short fiction of Flannery O’Connor. I then continued my education at Columbia University GSAS as a graduate student in English. In May 2024, I took my Master’s degree after researching and writing a hefty thesis on spiritualized commodities in J.D. Salinger’s Glass family stories. I am presently working in an editorial role at a publishing firm.

Please introduce us to your book collection. What areas do you collect in?
I began collecting important, meaningful texts at a fairly young age. Since early adolescence, I’ve felt a compulsive urge to surround myself with as much beautiful literature as possible! As I’ve grown older, the makeup of my collection has increasingly replicated my scholarly interests and fields of study. At present, the lion’s share of my texts are novels written in the 19th and early 20th centuries by British, American, French, Russian, and German authors. For the Honey and Wax competition, I presented 101 books in chronological order of publication, spanning the years 1830 and 1930. Among this vast and eclectic company are epic novels by Tolstoy, Dumas, and Dostoevsky, short stories by Edgar Poe and Kate Chopin, poems by Robert Browning, and plays by Chekhov and Ibsen.

How many books are in your collection?
During the past few years, my collection has reached a definite tipping point. Precarious piles of novels perch on every available surface. I estimate that the collection includes upwards of 300 individual books, from standard hardcovers and softcovers to pocket editions, hulking anthologies, and leatherbound volumes with decorative spines.

What was the first book you bought for your collection?
The first book that I purchased – as a mature, self-aware collector – was a wonderfully dense Signet Classics edition of Les Misérables, with a revitalized translation by Lee Fahnestock and Norman Macafee.

It came into my collection in June 2014, when I was fresh out of eighth grade and yearning to read something truly vital and elevating. As it happens, Les Misérables is probably the novel that has shaped my life most profoundly. It determined my future as a scholar of realist literature and as a life-long lover of stories.

Donna Marie Saunders

Items from Donna's collection

How about the most recent book?
The most recent addition to my collection is a Penguin Classics edition of The Last of the Mohicans. Another exceptional, life-changing text! This particular version has brilliant cover art and insightful endnotes. I’d like very much to get my hands on a 19th century printing of Mohicans or any of the Leatherstocking Tales, for that matter!

And your favorite book in your collection?
The chronological constraints that I set for my Honey and Wax contest submission prevented me from including one of my all-time favorite possessions, a first edition, first printing of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood which includes a letter typed by the author in 1952. Wise Blood is a tremendously underrated text – it shows O’Connor at her very best, deftly interweaving mystery, faith, and gothic imagery.

Best bargain you’ve found?
It’s always useful to surround yourself with fellow bibliophiles! Several years ago, I was lucky enough to buy two-dozen heavily discounted books from a neighbor in my Manhattan apartment building. The bounty included Oxford World Classics editions of The Red and the Black and Jude the Obscure, as well as several Dickens novels with picturesque ink-drawn artwork. It was the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, so caution required that I thoroughly clean each cover with disinfectant wipes. Certainly worth the effort!

How about The One that Got Away?
Every year I treat myself to an exploratory expedition through the narrow alleyways of the NY International Antiquarian Book Fair. There are always a few brilliant volumes that catch my eye but loom just out of reach. I’ve reluctantly passed over first printings of books by Nabokov and Graham Greene, among others.

What would be the Holy Grail for your collection?
I dream of owning a signed copy of a novel by one of my favorite authors, most of which lived during the early-mid-19th century. I feel very strongly about the materiality of texts. It thrills me to think that I, personally, could own something that once passed through the hands of a literary giant.

Who is your favorite bookseller / bookstore?

I like to purchase books anywhere and everywhere I can find them– small independent shops, antiquarian booksellers, big-box stores, university stores, even boutiques and hotel gift shops! I’m perpetually on the lookout for books to buy– or borrow, as the situation permits.

What would you collect if you didn’t collect books?

I would probably collect artwork or literary ephemera, photographs, letters, and newspaper clippings from moments in time that interest and uplift me. I do own an unconscionable amount of stationary (notebooks, pens, pencils). That’s a separate issue, though.