Winners of the 2015 Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prizes have been announced.
Both the senior and sophomore competitions this year had exceptionally strong candidates, and the judges were impressed by the quality of the collections themselves and the presentations made by the collectors. All of this year’s finalists are to be congratulated on their diligence and eloquence.
This year’s senior prize was awarded to Anthony Gareth Imparato of Silliman College for his collection titled “The Death of the Novel? Rare and First Editions of Post-Modernist Literature” (pictured above). Eric Sirakian of Jonathan Edwards College was awarded a senior second prize for his theater craft collection. Mason Shefa (Jonathan Edwards College) received a senior honorable mention for his collection on Christian communal theology as expressed through prayer and song, as did Eric Willett (Trumbull College) for his collection, “Architecture and Urbanism: A Textual Exploration of the Built Environment.”
For his collection on Soviet and Marxist-Leninist history (pictured above), Alexander Jacobson of Saybrook College won the sophomore prize. The sophomore second prize went to Eric De Villiers of Morse College for his collection on the theology, philosophy, and history of Catholicism. Sophomore honorable mentions were awarded to Emily Yankowitz (Pierson College) for her collection on the role of Westchester County, New York, in the early republic and to Jacob Reed (Branford College) for his collection on the Baroque and Bach.
For more than half a century, student bibliophiles have been receiving prizes for the quality of their book collections, thanks to the generosity of Yale alumnus Adrian Van Sinderen (Class of 1910). In 1957 Mr. Van Sinderen established two prizes, for Yale seniors and sophomores, in order to encourage undergraduates to collect books, build up libraries of their own, and read for pleasure and learning. In 2002 an annual poster competition was added, awarding a prize to the winning designer of the poster used to announce the book collecting competition.
Judges for this year’s competition were William Reese ’77 (Chair), Joseph Agostini ’93, Elisabeth Fairman, Rebecca Martz, Stephen Parks ’61, Dana Schneider ’15, E.C. Schroeder, and Sylvia Van Sinderen.