Margery Barker (8 January 1901 - 6 May 1980). With partner Frances Hamill, Hamill & Barker, Inc. was a leading antiquarian book firm in Chicago from 1928. The firm was taken over by shop employee Terence Tanner after Hamill's death in 1987. Tanner moved Hamill & Baker to Evanston, Illinois in 1988, and continued the business until his death in 2003.
The archives of Hamill & Barker, Inc. are held at Northwestern University.
Per Dickinson, Dictionary of American Antiquarian Bookdealers (Greenwood Press, 1998), Barker got her start in the trade in 1922 working in the Chicago book shop of Fanny Butcher.
Among major collections to pass through the shop, Hamill & Barker handled the George Poole collection of manuscripts and incunabula. Per Dickinson, this collection was subsequently purchased by David Randall for the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Hamill & Barker also secured the purchase of the Virginia Woolf diaries in 1960 for the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.
Barker had attended Bryn Mawr but was expelled in 1921. Her case for reinstatement became subject of a lawsuit. An account sympathetic to Barker's case was published in 1921. The case was covered in the New York Times in 1922.
