2011-05-10

Reverend Maurus Mount, O.S.B., a Doctoral candidate in Classical Philology, has won the T.W. Baldwin Prize for Book Collecting for his collection of Roman Catholic liturgical books from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Rev. Mount’s collection of finely-printed works from the Belgian firm Desclée, and the German company Pustet, are beautiful productions that combine fine typography, engraving, gilding, and bindings.  For his entry, Rev. Mount wins a $1,000 prize.

Entrant Robin Camille Davis, a Masters candidate in Library and Information Science, is awarded 2nd Place in the T.W. Baldwin contest for her collection, “An Assemblage of Abecedaries.” This wide-ranging collection includes dictionaries, usage guides, foreign language dictionaries, and even dictionaries written both in earnest and in jest by non-lexicographers. Davis wins a $500 prize.

Selections from Rev. Mount’s and Robin Davis’s collections are on display in the Marshall Gallery of the Main Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through May 16, 2011.

The Book Collecting Contest is sponsored by The Rare Book & Manuscript Library , the Main Library, and the No. 44 Society , a local Book Collectors’ Group centered in the Rare Book Library. The contest is now in its fifth year. All contestants to the T.W. Baldwin Prize for Book Collecting receive a free subscription to Friendscript , the newsletter of the University Library’s Office of Advancement. Winners may be eligible for the national College Book Collecting Contest sponsored by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America.

T.W. Baldwin, a professor of English at Illinois from 1925-1955, put together a world-renowned collection of imprints from the age of Shakespeare that became a core component of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

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