The winners of the third annual David Ruggles Prize, an international book collecting prize established in 2020 to support and encourage young collectors of color, have been announced.
This year's competition was marked by a record number of submissions, more than twice the first two years combined, and representing more than a dozen countries around the world.
Jordan Ross, who has been collecting for ten years, wins the $1,000 grand prize for his collection of 'Black Collegiate Textbooks and Histories'. According to the judges: "Ross provides not only a snapshot of African American history textbooks in use during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but also the increasingly scarce histories of the HBCUs that taught with those same textbooks."
Jordan's story started in Fall 2014 with a visit to the campus bookstore at Morehouse College, where he had just started his first year. He asked staff for a history of the college, only to learn that the most recent one was 50 years out of print. He walked up the street to Spelman College, asked for the same thing, and learned that its history, too, was out of print. Now numbering more than 200 books, Ross' distinctive engagement with a print culture specific to HBCUs aims to preserve these vanishing histories. One judge commented: "Man, Jordan just really ran away with it!"
Nubia Lateefa Baraka comes away with the $500 second prize for her 'People's Porch' collection. Unable to find in her local library the work of historians John Henrik Clarke and Yosef Ben-Jochannan, she realized that she would have to request from another library almot everything she wanted to read, so set about building her own collection of largely vintage, and invariably hard-to-get, Black literature and memorabilia, "works that have fallen between the cracks and been forgotten."
Her collection now includes more than 600 books and carries a name that reflects its community-driven mission, her desire to make available the otherwise unobtainable. The judges were only too happy to reward Baraka's participation in, as the collector herself puts it, "the legacy of independent Black preservation and memory work." "Love the outreach portion," one judge said, emphasising that many of the best book collections are assembled for use.
Elvira (Vera) Jiā Xī Mancini takes home the $250 third prize for her global Pride and Prejudice collection. When starting middle school, her father gave her his own childhood copy of the Jane Austen novel. Some time later, Mancini found herself in France and picked up a copy in French. When her father's work began demanding international travel, he'd always ask Vera if he could bring home a souvenir. Her invariable request? A copy of Pride and Prejudice in the local language.
More than a decade later, some copies she has collected herself, while others came from friends and family on the move, each one purchased in person. More than a portrait of Pride and Prejudice's international presence, this is a collection that tells the many personal stories of international travel. "I really liked the justification for focusing on a single title," said one judge. The judging panel commented: "Mancini's justification demands patience and rewards method. She offers a potent corrective to an age of effortless international online shopping."
The five judges for this year's prize were Cairo-based book artist, papermaker, and lecturer Islam Aly; Lauren Burke, Chicago-based writer and host of the Bonnets at Dawn podcast; Angelina Coronado, PhD student at Columbia University researching Caribbean modernities, with a focus on the Dominican Republic; Sara Powell, Assistant Curator of Early Books and Manuscript’s at Harvard’s Houghton Library; and Bridgett Kathryn Johnson-Pride, Director of Public Services for Archives and Special Collections at the Houghton.
