Allie is your friendly neighborhood pink-haired book historian, and curator of Special Collections at the Winterthur Library.

Born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, Allie fostered a deep love for history, books, and “old stuff” throughout their childhood. After obtaining an undergraduate degree in Linguistics from the University of Kansas, they moved to Edinburgh, Scotland to pursue a Master’s of Science in Book History at the University of Edinburgh. After graduating with merit, they undertook an additional Master’s of Science at the University of Glasgow in Information Management. From there, they took a position as a Library Technician (later promoted to Reference Librarian) in the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Special Collections, and then as a rare book cataloguer at antiquarian book dealer Type Punch Matrix. You can learn about Allie’s career in more detail in the “CV” section of this website.

Allie loves to talk to people about books. Seriously. Social media, lectures, talks, articles, videos, you name it; their career priority is to make the world of rare books more accessible for anyone with any level of expertise.

In their free time, Allie enjoys sewing, jigsaw puzzles, playing Magic: The Gathering, and having conversations with their cat Jeremy, who seems to love meowing as much as Allie loves talking about books.

Allie is nonbinary, and uses the pronouns she/her and they/them interchangeably. For ease of comprehension of this “about” section, though, they just used one throughout.