2005 Book-Collecting Champions

In 2005, twenty-six colleges and universities, all but one of them located in the United States, awarded prizes in book-collecting contests. Science fiction and fantasy collections are common entries; the early passion for reading that these otherworldly books inspire often translates into acquisitiveness. The 2005 contests were no exception, and two winners entered genre collections. Elizabeth Kestler, a freshman at Bryn Mawr, has been collecting science-fiction books since middle school and won her college contest with a selection from her 250-book library. At the University of Minnesota, David Oosterhuis picked up a $700 cash prize for his Edgar Rice Burroughs collection.

However, what is most surprising about the recent winners is the international scope of many of the collections, which proved to be of considerable interest to the librarians running the contests. As an example, Arizona State (ASU) doctoral candidate Lutfi Hussein, a native of Jordan, has built a fine personal library of scholarly editions of classic Islamic texts. At California State University, Stanislaus (CSUS), located in the Central Valley east of San Francisco, José García’s winning entry consisted of radical political tracts published in Latin America. Brian Duggan, who organizes the CSUS contest, said that the acquisitions librarians carefully reviewed García’s bibliography with an eye toward adding some of the books to the library. Hussein said he planned to donate books to the ASU library, which, like many universities these days, needs more Arabic-language texts. Other winning international topics included the Silk Road (which produced winners at two colleges), Chinese history, travel guides, and Caribbean literature.

College students often organize their collections around their majors, but many winning entries showed broader interests as well. John Miles at Cornell entered a collection of books on classic cars. Sara Doherty’s collection of zines —self-published chapbooks of poetry or essays on politics, music, and sex—won out over a more traditional collection entered by a law student. Peter Berg, the assistant director of special collections at Michigan State University, said, “We were really impressed and captivated by Doherty’s collection of zines. Zines are a wonderful new development in the world of publishing and books.”

Jacob Savage, Princeton’s 2005 winner with a collection of unusual and forgotten history books, may have best summed up the reason why all the contestants bought their books: “I just love the way they are written.”