The Katharine Kyes Leab & Daniel J. Leab American Book Prices Current Exhibition Award Winners 2008

The Exhibition Awards Committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 Katharine Kyes Leab & Daniel J. Leab American Books Prices Current Exhibition Awards.

A complete list of entries for the 2008 competition with contact and ordering/access information, as well as lists of entries and winners for other years, may be found on the RBMS Exhibition Awards Committee page.

Award certificates were presented on Sunday, 29 June 2008, preceding the RBMS Information Exchange at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, California. The list below includes the remarks of the chair of the Exhibition Awards Committee, as given in the presentation.

Division One (Expensive Printed Catalogs)

The Grolier Club, Illustrating the Good Life: The Pissarros' Eragny Press, 1894-1914: A Catalogue of an Exhibition of Books, Prints & Drawings Related to the Work of the Press, by Alice H. R. H. Beckwith; preface by Alan Fern; designed by Jerry Kelly, 2007. Softcover, ix, 69 pp., 40 ills., Color.

Illustrating the Good Life is best characterized as a beautifully composed catalog, one that does its very good best to complement, as a sympathetically designed book, the books printed at the Eragny Press. This press, less well known perhaps than others of the first generation of fine presses (Kelmscott, Doves, Vale, etc.), was both a cross-Channel and, as we would say, an interdisciplinary enterprise, undertaken in the full spirit of the arts and crafts movement. The Pissarros' work requires, for full appreciation of its successes, an eye practiced in reading the printed image back through the attention to detail and harmonious composition that brought it to being as a crafted object. Alice Beckwith's text—in the general introduction and in the individual commentaries—is intended at every point to recall the reader, as a member of "the book-loving public," to a consciousness of process, not simply as a set of isolated techniques, but, in this case particularly, as a lived aesthetic. The designer has assembled and styled the printed text and the images with something of the same feel as the work of the press (without imitating the full density of its typography, but with sensitivity to its sense of color). Above all, this is an informative catalog, a worthy contribution to the history of the Eragny Press in its historical moment, starting with the books that influenced it, proceeding through its own work, and ending with an account of its influence on the work of others, with the valuable addition of an extensive bibliography and an index.

Division Two (Moderately Expensive Printed Catalogs)

Chicago Public Library, Special Collections and Preservation Division, One Book, Many Interpretations, by the Special Collections and Preservation Division, Chicago Public Library; designed by Kathryn Tutkus, 2006. Softcover, 40 pp., 51 ills., Color.

This little catalog—little by design, but well packed—is the outcome of what one might think to be as "general collections" a project as a public library could undertake: to encourage, by way of the reading of the same book by many people, a "culture of reading." It was an inspired idea to take the One Book, One Chicago reading program and extend it to the creation of a small but rich collection of forty-seven interpretive fine bindings (and one bonus binding by the exhibit curator), under the direction of the Chicago Public Library's Special Collections and Preservation Division. All the better that it represented both aspects of the Division. The resulting catalog provides a history of the program itself, and a conspectus of the work of some of the best Anglo-American hand bookbinders. The illustrations are necessarily small, given the format of the book, but good enough (and based on very good photography) to convey the character of each binding. The descriptions of the bindings are such as one would expect in a properly detailed library catalog: clear, well-phrased, and unfussily technical. The book is decidedly designed—for instance, the fore-edge running titles and fore- and bottom-edge page borders anchored by the pagination—but functionally, not obtrusively so. Even the cover design, with the die-cut circle giving us the One Book program device "before letters," adds to the fun. We are particularly happy to make this award to a public library building on the culture of reading to advance the culture of the book.

Division Three (Inexpensive Printed Catalogs)

Vassar College, Mapping America: 500 years of Cartographic Depictions, by Ronald Patkus, Mary Ann Cunningham, and Philippe Thibault; designed by the Office of College Relations, Vassar College, 2007. Softcover, 32 pp., 7 ills., Color.

It might be taken as a sign of what this catalog is, that it was entered under the name Vassar College, rather than Vassar College Libraries. It does include a checklist of an exhibition held in the Vassar College Library, consisting of materials held by the "Vassar College Libraries"; but the work as a whole is about the pedagogical underpinnings of the process that brought it into being. The basic theme is stated by Ronald Patkus, in his introductory essay. While conceding that "the holdings here do not have the breadth or depth of collections in larger institutions," he goes on to say, "Viewed as a whole, the collection of atlases and maps that has been assembled by the library is a valuable resource that continues the Vassar tradition of learning by 'going to the source.'" Moreover, "A special aspect of 'Mapping America' is that students—not only librarians—have played an important role in its creation." In addition to Patkus' discussion of the mounting of the exhibition, and the peculiar challenges that maps represent in that respect, there are essays by Philippe Thibault (instructor of the class that assisted), on "Studying Historical Maps in the Vassar Classroom," and by Mary Ann Cunningham (of the Geography Dept.), "Contemplating the Art of Cartography," an introduction to the reading of maps as exemplars of "mythology and ideology" and "authority and aesthetics." The catalog has been well designed and produced, at relatively little cost, and represents one ideal of the exhibition catalog, as a permanent contribution to the institution's own resources for making the best use of its collections—and as a signpost for others.

Division Four (Brochures)

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Collecting an Empire: The East India Company (1600-1900), by Ayesha Ramachandran; designed by Jo Ellen Ackerman, Bessas and Ackerman, 2006. 12 pp., 6 ills., Color.

The various elements by which this committee judges brochures are here of the highest quality. Ayesha Ramachandran's 1000-word essay, which might well serve to introduce a comprehensive history of the EIC, is a model of scholarly concision that orients—and, we might say, occidents—an intelligent reader to the historical background and material scope of this exhibition, which drew on a number of Beinecke collections. The text, as printed, is also an example of straightforward good typography. The six color illustrations—finely and, in the case of the reduced facsimiles, legibly printed—represent the exhibition's wide variety of documents and graphics, with captions that succinctly identify and place them. The tri-fold format has been well used: the formal front cover title and back cover facsimile exemplify, when opened to face each other, the contrasting modes of cultural confrontation that inform the exhibition as a whole; and the interior is a well balanced triptych of printed and facsimile text. The brochure is of handy size, printed on heavy (and thus sturdy) matte stock, the ideal, non-glossy medium for fine-grained graphics. In none of these things is it startlingly innovative: its business is to stay out of its own way and let its excellent contents through.

Division Five (Electronic Exhibitions)

North Carolina State University Libraries Special Collections Research Center, B. W. Wells, Pioneer Ecologist, Kevin Schlesier, curator; Amy Rudersdorf and Riggs Ward Design, designers, 2007.
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/exhibits/wells

This online exhibition is the most publicly accessible node of a system of exhibition, catalog, and online resources devoted to the life and work of B. W. Wells, an interesting but little known pioneer of the movement in natural science from botanical description to the systems approach known as ecology. All the elements of this archival ecology, so to call it, are consistent in design, and allow the viewer/reader the opportunity to follow a narrative, or to branch out to image and sound (oral history) resources that go well beyond the boundaries of the exhibition proper, yet allow one to backtrack and set out in other directions without the confusion that may sometimes be observed in other sites that attempt the same sort of multiple linkings. Taken together, it is an exemplary exercise in telling a story using archival materials of many kinds, of which the online exhibition is the real linchpin.