2010-05-03
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library has announced the winners of their Book Collecting Contests. The contests were open to University of Illinois undergraduate and graduate students. Awards will be presented on Wednesday, May 5, 2009 at 3:00 p.m. during the meeting of The No. 44 Society , the book collecting club of Champaign-Urbana. First Prize winners receive $1,000.
Bailey N. Pike and Ann Heinrichs, both Masters candidates in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), are co-winners of the T.W Baldwin Prize for Book Collecting for graduate students. Pike’s collection, “The Mythology of Mozart,” documents cultural responses to the life and legend of one of the world’s great composers. Besides critical and biographical works, the collection also features children’s books that exploit the latter-day conception of Mozart as “Wunderkind,” or boy-genius, as well as works that leverage the genius motif into supporting quasi-scientific theories about learning. Heinrich’s winning collection, “60 Years of Children’s Literature, 1888-1948,” showcases illustrated children’s books; including fables, books about pets and animals, and schoolbooks.
Caitlyn M. Reizman, double major in Anthropology and English, has won the 2010 Harris Fletcher Book Collecting Award for undergraduates. Her collection of versions of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” entitled “Adapting Harry Potter as a Symbol of Global Interconnectivity,” features 24 select versions of this world-wide publishing phenomenon, including translations into Farsi, Afrikaans, Hebrew, Chinese, Ukrainian, Braille, and even ancient Greek and Latin.
Second Prize in the Baldwin contest goes to Jessica Knebel (GSLIS) for her collection “Books on Nature.” Honorable mention goes to Jessica Rugh Frantz (GSLIS).
Second Prize in the Fletcher contest goes to LAS student Edward Miller for his “General U.S. Military Books with an Emphasis on the U.S. Marine Corps” collection. Honorable mention is awarded to School of Molecular and Cellular Biology undergrad Riley Hoff-Larocca.
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.
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