Pintar decided to enter the contest last year, when his freshman adviser, who knew of his extensive book collection, alerted him to the contest.

“I have collected books almost my whole life, and the project itself seemed like a fun thing to do. Plus, I thought I had a fair chance of winning a prize” he says.

Pintar says his family contributed to his dedication and love for books.

“On a Saturday morning, we’d go out on a family walk and stop at a few bookstores and get a few nice new books. Buying and reading books is a big part of our lives,” he says.

“My family has a library with somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 volumes,” he adds.

Pintar says the Marxism collection he submitted to the contest was inspired by his childhood and family experiences.

“I’ve been interested in Marxist theory for a very long time, partly because of my historical experience in growing up in a formerly communist country, and partially because of my family’s involvement with Marxist theory,” he says.

His grandparents were part of the Communist resistance during World War II and his family traced their involvement with the Party back four generations. However, in the early 1980s, Pintar’s family was expelled from the party for being too left wing.

The tradition of book collecting in Pintar’s family also goes back many generations.

“One of the reasons that I keep a personal library that is so well-documented is because of my great-grandfather, who was a politician in the center-left party in Croatia, and also a great book collector,” he says. “When he died, his quite sizable library was donated to a public school library, but when the Nationalists came to power in Croatia, his collection was purged, along with many other books that were deemed ideologically incorrect. All his manuscripts and memoirs also disappeared without a trace.”

Pintar, who says he reads quickly and diligently, restricts most of his pleasure reading to summers, although right now he is reading some books on medieval Latin poetry, the Bosnian war and theoretical biology.

Gunning for the Prize

The contest requests that students interested in submitting must have declared their intent to enter by last Friday, and according to Cole, the number of applicants for this year’s contest is on the high end.

The official deadline for full applications is Feb. 14.

Priscilla Orta ’05 declared her intent to enter the contest with her 30-volume collection of books about Latinos in the United States, focusing on Mexican-Americans and Mexican migrant workers, including titles such as Heroic Mexico, Crossing Over, With These Hands and Immigrant America.