Winners of the 2018 Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prizes have been announced.
The judges note that both the senior and sophomore competitions had exceptionally strong candidates, and they were impressed by the quality of the collections themselves and the presentations made by the collectors.
This year’s senior prize was awarded to Suh Young (Sunnie) Kim of Saybrook College for her collection, “Contemporary Voices of South Korean Women in Light of the Recent Popularization of Feminism in South Korea.” Noah Stevens-Stein of Trumbull College was awarded the senior second prize for his collection, “Auction Catalogs and Art Collecting.”
The sophomore prize was awarded to Nathaniel Kerman of Pauli Murray College for his collection, “Physics, Astronomy, and Photography: Revealing the Hidden through Sight and Insight.” Sophomore honorable mention was awarded to Catherine Lee of Grace Hopper College for her collection, “Literature through the Ages.”
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 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. Kyungjae (Daniel) Lee ’20 of Benjamin Franklin College was selected as the winning designer in this year’s poster competition. Thomas Huang ’19, Julia Ma ’19, and Deborah Monti ’19, all of Jonathan Edward College, were awarded honorable mentions.
The judges for this year’s competition are William Reese ’77 (chair); Joseph Agostini ’93, Elisabeth Fairman; Basie Gitlin ’10; Rebecca Martz; Miko McGinty ’93, ’98 M.F.A.; Stephen Parks ’61; E.C. Schroeder; Claire Thomas ’19; and Sylvia Van Sinderen.
