2009-05-06
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library announced the winners of their Book Collecting Contests yesterday. The contests were open to University of Illinois undergraduate and graduate students. Awards will be presented on May 6, 2009 at 3:00 p.m. during the meeting of The No. 44 Society , the book collecting club of Champaign-Urbana.
Luis Eduardo Herrera, PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology has won the 2009 T.W Baldwin Prize for Book Collecting for his comprehensive collection of Latin American Avant-Garde Art Music that features scores and manuscripts from fourteen Latin American countries and over 130 authors.
Stephen Lipovsky, a Senior in the Department of Anthropology, has won the Harris Fletcher Book Collecting award for his collection of pamphlets, maps, and books documenting the land-settlement boom in the westward expansion of the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Winners receive $1,000 and are encouraged to use a portion of the prize money to attend “ Bibliography Week” in New York City, a yearly book-lover’s gathering in January.
All contestants receive free student memberships to the Library Friends organization.
Winning collections are also eligible for further competition on a national scale through the Collegiate Book Collecting Championship overseen by “Fine Books and Collections” magazine.
Honorable mention prizes go to graduate students Steven Gump and Bernardo Urbani, and to Vanessa French, a senior Classics major. Honorable mention winners receive a copy of “ABC for Book Collectors,” published by the prestigious Oak Knoll Press.
The annual contests are meant to foster the love of books and to introduce students to the pleasures of book collecting. The Harris Fletcher award honors a professor of English at Illinois who assembled one of the finest John Milton collections in the world. T.W. Baldwin, another professor of English, put together a remarkable collection of imprints from the age of Shakespeare. Together, these collections formed the foundation of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Do you have a story you’d like added to the Library News & Events? If so, please contact Heather Murphy ( hmurphy@illinois.edu ).