Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize 2023 Winners Announced
Auroura Morgan with her prizewinning collection
The 2023 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize has been won by Auroura Morgan, owner of Black Lantern Tattoo Co., Nashville, Tennessee, for Hybrid Botanicals: A Modern Tattoo Artist’s Reference Collection.
The annual prize was established in 2017 by by Heather O’Donnell of Honey & Wax Booksellers and Rebecca Romney of Type Punch Matrix for American women book collectors, aged 30 years and under in order to highlight original collections built by young women and inspire potential collectors.
"We were impressed by the cross-pollination between Morgan’s book collection, the clients she serves, and the art she creates," said the judges who awarded the $1,000 prize. "Her collection is more than a standard reference library, providing templates to copy. It is a living collection, inspiring new design approaches in response to her clients’ ideas and needs. A continually generative resource, the collection reflects Morgan’s interests and inspires her to transform them in the studio, tattoo by tattoo, into a body of original botanical art."
In addition, five honorable mentions of $250 each were awarded to:
* Cate Barton from Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, a student in the dual BA program between Sciences Po Paris and Columbia University, for Film on the Page: Creative Intersections of Cinema and Books
* Kierra Duncan from Los Angeles, California, a doctoral candidate in English at Princeton University, for Origin Stories: Anthologies and Bibliographies in Afro-Diasporic Literature
* Abbey Elder from Ames, Iowa, the Open Access Librarian for Iowa State University, for A Collection of Works by and concerning Roger Zelazny
* Madeline Lafuse from Columbia, Maryland, a doctoral candidate in history at the CUNY Graduate Center, and teacher at Brooklyn’s Berkeley Carroll School, for Interior Design and Internet Age Globalization, 1995-2005
* Sara Mohr from Utica, New York, the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Hamilton College, for Lux ex Oriente: The Many Histories of the Ancient Near East
The 2023 prize sponsors are Biblio, Bibliopolis, The Caxton Club, Swann Galleries, and Ellen A. Michelson.
