Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize Won by Elena Wicker for U.S. Military Dictionaries Collection

This is the eighth annual iteration of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize co-founded by Heather O'Donnell and Rebecca Romney which offers $1,000 for an outstanding book collection conceived and built by a young woman in the United States, aged 30 or younger. This year's sponsors were Biblio, Bibliopolis, The Caxton Club, Christie's, and Ellen A. Michelson.

Wicker's collection features more than 200 American military dictionaries, official and unauthorized, spanning two centuries.

“I began by trying to find the outliers, the first, the last, the biggest, the strangest. Every published dictionary notes which dictionary was now obsolete, or ‘superseded’. Each book tells you what came before it. I traced each dictionary all the way back to its first edition," she explained. "The U.S. Army has published over 30 dictionaries, the Department of Defense has published over 70. I eventually expanded my research to tell the story of the U.S. Navy as well. I collected naval encyclopedias from the 1880s, the famous Jane’s Guide to Fighting Ships from World War II, and lexicons of mariner and naval terms. One of the reasons why I love my collection is because these books weren’t intended for someone like me, a civilian female researcher.”

The judges commented: "We were impressed by the disciplined ambition of Wicker’s collection, pursued within clear national and chronological limits. Her bibliography was exemplary, with close attention paid to the materiality and historical significance of each book, including copy-specific points. The collection reveals a process of continual discovery, using these dictionaries, “invisible observers of history,” to tell a more expansive story about language, politics, and change." You can read her essay and bibliography here.

In addition to the main prize five honorable mentions of $250 each were also made:

* Emily Chauvin, an artist and writer from New Milford, Connecticut, for Theory/Practice: A Meta-Aesthetics Collection focusing on books of art-about-art, ranging from William Blake to Yoko Ono

* Elena Ganzevoort, of Durham, North Carolina, a former book editor, for Under the Peacock’s Feathers: Discovering Literature through Art Nouveau, a collection of Art Nouveau publishers’ bindings, including examples by celebrated fin-de-siècle book designers Albert Angus Turbayne and Hugh Thomson

* Kirin Gupta, a doctoral candidate and teacher in Alexandria, Virginia, for Femmes Fatales: The Violence and Power of Women Against Empire, books by and about women insurgents, guerrillas, and revolutionaries, exploring how gendered expectations shape the way that women’s long-standing participation in political violence is received

* Donna Sanders, 23, of New York City, a recent master’s graduate in English, for From The Red and the Black to The Man Without Qualities: 101 Texts in 101 Years, one reprint of one work of Western literature for every year between 1830 and 1930 to create a three-dimensional mosaic of the long 19th century

* Amelia Soth, a freelance writer and editor from Madison, Wisconsin, for Infinite Fiction: Novels of Classification, a collection of “books that play – in a vast range of ways – with the format of the reference work: the dictionary, the encyclopedia, the catalog, the travel guide, the textbook, the atlas.” Her collection ranges from established classics like Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and Jorge Luis Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius to more recent works by Milorad Pavić, Sophie Calle, and Roberto Bolaño.