Although the judges do not require students to submit their entire collections for examination, they do have the right to ask to examine the entire collection or a part of it.

“This contest is not about great books at all. It’s about finding a subject that you want to learn about and build a body of knowledge about something that’s not necessarily going to be relevant to a Core class,” she says.

On the contest’s website is a statement by former University President Neil L. Rudenstine’s words that captures the spirit of the book prize.

He explains his emotional and intellectual attachment to the books that he has collected over the years:

”Without my books, I feel at sea, without moorings; without a frame; without personal and intellectual syntax; without the kind of structure that I need to find my way back to so many of the ideas, emotions, and revelations that are so much a part of me and my own history.”

History of the Contest

The subjects of winning collections have varied widely in the past, ranging from East Asian cooking and artifacts relating to the Berlin subway system to comic books, children’s book illustrations, aviation dictionaries and lepidoptery.

The only requirement the contest stipulates is that collections focus on a particular author, scholarly subject or some form of print medium.

“Developing book collections with a definite sense of cohesion makes you aware of the relationship between books at an early age,” says Nancy M. Cline, who is the Larsen librarian of Harvard College. “And because understanding how a group of books relate to each other is so complementary to doing scholarly research, this contest is of great value to undergraduates.”

“The contest serves as a reminder of a time when you had a different relationship to the books that you owned,” says Professor Ann M. Blair, who teaches a course called History 1318, “History of the Book and Reading,” and who recently won a MacArthur Fellowship for her enduring love of books.

“You would annotate them, make notes in the margins. Books were of emotional value,” she explains.

Blair says that although our culture has changed, the contest upholds important scholarly practices.

“We now have different kinds of media—everyone has files on webmail, but books are still important as long-term media,” Blair says. “This contest plays into a very old and very long tradition of collecting books.”

Last year, David M. Orenstein ’02 won first prize for his essay and bibliography on Shanghai. Pintar garnered second prize for his entry on Marxist philosophy and book collecting practices, entitled ‘From Marxians to Martians.’ Susan Long ’02 won third prize for her entry on family-owned collections.

Story of a Winner