Posted: 3/29/07 Section: Diversions

Media Credit: Daniel Quist D.W. Krummel, professor in Library Science, talks with graduate students.

The Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University's main library is easy to miss.

Tucked away on the third floor, and hidden behind imposing doors that lock behind visitors when they enter and must be unlocked to leave, the quiet library houses links to the past. To browse the stacks of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library is to lose oneself to history. There is a feeling of great age, value and mystique. There could be anything there, buried in a forgotten nook, overlooked by countless people, only to be discovered now. A literary Grail might await.

It is fitting, then, that the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and its resident book collecting organization, The No. 44 Society, play host to the second annual Book Collecting Contest. This contest pits student book collectors against one another in a competition to assemble the most complete, well thought-out and creative book collections.

There are two separate competitions for undergraduate and graduate students, who will be awarded the Harris Fletcher Book Collecting Award and the T.W. Baldwin Prize for Book Collecting, respectively.

First prize in each category is a $250 award and a trip to New York City for Bibliography Week (January 22-26, 2008), a Mecca of sorts for organizations devoted to book collecting and book history. Winners will also receive an invitation to a special reception at one of the country's largest book collecting organizations, The Grolier Club.

Second prize in the contest is a one-year subscription to Fine Books and Collecting. Last year's winner, Adam Doskey, won with a collection of writings and criticisms of the works of English poet and novelist Malcolm Lowry, the author of "Under the Volcano."

"Students can be book collectors and not even know it," said Valerie Hotchkiss, head of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. "If you happen to like one particular author or genre, you may have a collection and not even realize it."

She cited cookbooks, science fiction collections and comic book collections as the sort of noneducational or "literary" collections that stand an equal chance of winning the contest.

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