The Katharine Kyes Leab & Daniel J. Leab American Book Prices Current Exhibition Award Winners 2009

The Exhibition Awards Committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries is pleased to announce the following winners of the 2009 Katharine Kyes Leab & Daniel J. Leab American Books Prices Current Exhibition Awards.

A complete list of entries for the 2009 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, 12 July 2009, preceding the RBMS Information Exchange at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois. 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 Getty Research Institute, for China on Paper: European and Chinese Works from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century, edited by Marcia Reed and Paula Dematte, with contributions by Gang Song and Richard Strassberg; designed by Jim Drobka with Stuart Smith.

This year's Division 1 winner is a prime and very substantial specimen of the scholarly catalog. While providing a record of the exhibition itself, it ranges far beyond the specifics of the exhibition, especially in the accompanying scholarly essays. That isn't to say that the "Catalog" itself, which appears as a kind of massive appendix, is not already a highly detailed affair, with descriptions that far exceed anything that would fit on wall labels, or could be read or even digested while viewing the exhibition. It is the profusely illustrated historical essays that evidence the real purpose of this publication. From a single acquisition—a portfolio of engravings depicting the European Pavilions built by Jesuit missionaries at the request of the emperor of China—came a program of focused collecting, to answer the basic question, "Well, where did these come from?" This program of what we might call acquisitive curiosity realizes its purpose as three scholarly experts and the curator interpret the collected materials from various angles, to produce new readings of the relationship between China and the West in the period before the Western imperial adventure muddied the cultural waters forever. The physical book reflects, as it should, the expense of its production, allowing a spaciousness of design that balances text and illustrations in a way that allows one to see, as well as read, what the essays are talking about.

Honorable mention:

The Grolier Club, for The Proper Decoration of Book Covers: The Life and Work of Alice C. Morse, by Mindell Dubansky, with Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen and Josephine M. Dunn; designed by Jerry Kelly.

This catalog constitutes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature of its field, and documents an instance of book collecting, by Mindell Dubansky, as a form of research. There isn't an element of this book that isn't excellent of its kind and useful in its own right, including the provision of a general essay by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen that provides historical context and a fresh view. It is so excellent of its kind that the Exhibitions Award Committee felt that it deserved an honorable mention as something exquisite to place alongside the weighty and impressive winner from the Getty Research Institute. The audience obviously includes all of the many people who have taken Sue Allen's Rare Book School course, "Publisher’s Bookbindings, 1830-1910," and anyone else with more than passing interest in graphic design, women's work, publishing history, etc. The catalog is highly detailed; the apparatus of chronology, glossary, bibliography, and multiple indexes is everything one hopes for in work of this kind; and the design and production values are as one expects from those involved.

Division Two (Moderately Expensive Printed Catalogs)

Stanford University Libraries' Department of Special Collections, for Experiments in Navigation: The Art of Charles Hobson, by Charles Hobson; preface by May Castleberry; designed by Elizabeth Fischbach.

Artists' books, as subjects of exhibition catalogs, do give one a leg-up, in that they tend to be more visually engaging than, say, important philosophical texts; but the designer of this catalog, Elizabeth Fischbach, has not simply rested on the artist's laurels. The wealth of material available in Charles Hobson's archive, recently donated to Stanford University, has been turned to every sort of advantage. One proceeds through the book, from one opening to the next, with growing admiration for the skilful coordination of typography, text, and captions, and the disposition of the various sorts of illustrations, including photographs that manage to convey the complex three-dimensionality of the books' structures. All these elements are deployed in the service of a narrative logic, to produce a record of the origin, planning, and techniques of each work. This is followed through in the impeccable quality of the image reproduction, printing and paper. The catalog is a desideratum for any collection that features artists' books in general, and an obvious must-have item for those who collect Hobson's books in particular.

Division Three (Inexpensive Printed Catalogs)

Rare Books and Special Collections department at the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, for Scottie Fitzgerald: The Stewardship of Literary Memory, by Matthew J. Broccoli; curated by Jeffrey Makala; designed by Kimberley Massey, USC Publications; CD produced by Edwin C. Breland.

In this category of the Leab Awards, we know that production values may reflect necessary economies. We did poll our feelings about the choice of dark brown ink on cream-colored paper; but perhaps a higher contrast black on white was unkind to the images, which, while readable, are not the highest possible resolution. Nevertheless, the design works perfectly well, and is really secondary to the curation of the exhibition and the compiling of the catalog. Matthew Bruccoli was an all-around bookman, a biographer and deep collector of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Beginning in the late 1960s he collaborated with Scottie Fitzgerald in the cultivation of her father's posthumous reputation and the revival of interest in his work, what Scottie called her "Daddy projects", begun in the 1950s. This gives the text a first-hand intimacy with its subject: Scottie herself, as a vital "keeper of the flame" and guardian of the integrity of her father's archive. The catalogue, profusely illustrated and issued with a CD of a Fitzgerald-Bruccoli interview, is an element of this critical/historical process, here much aided and abetted by the curator, Jeffrey Makala. It is at once the successful outcome of this curator's work with a living donor, and a memorial to Bruccoli himself as a collector and more than a collector, having been completed less than a year before his death in June 2008.

Division Four (Brochures)

The Book Club of California, for The Book Art of Edward Gorey, by Malcolm Whyte; designed by Ivar Diehl.

One of the pleasures of reviewing the brochures is the chance to handle a number of such neat little contraptions as this one. It is all the more appropriate in this case, for, as the brochure notes, Edward Gorey "made forays into the flexibility of eclectic book formats"—that is to say, Gorey himself delighted in bookish contraptions. Just having Gorey to work with takes you a long way, of course, but he's not taken for granted here. There is something of the toy theatre in it, in the way that "the scene discloses," beginning with single-page front and back covers, then on to the title display (ta-dah!), and then another turn to add a poster. Fully opened, the inside pages make sense, while the verso is definitely "backstage," a series of openings in waiting. The scale is just right in its reminiscence of Gorey's miniature books. All the essentials are covered, including a checklist and curator's notes (concise and attractively informative), and that tiny poster with the exhibition details. It's an excellent example of knowing what you want and getting it right by way of creatively imitative design.

The story behind this little piece was written up in the club's Quarterly Journal by Danya Winterman, who with Ivar Diehl and Daniel Bermudez (collectively "The Key Printing and Binding") created it. She writes, "We design by hand, mechanically building up an actual layout with pencil and t-square on a drafting table. When possible we hand-letter type, as, for example, on the banners on the cover of the keepsake and the front of the postcard. We love how different printing styles complement each other when incorporated into single finished pieces. … When the fifth and final color was printed on the keepsake, and all that was left was folding, we went up onto our balcony, looked at the stars, and lit off an old Roman candle firework. … Perhaps we celebrated too early, because folding loomed ahead, and it turned out to be more difficult than we ever expected." Technical details: "five color offset, printed on a Multilith 1850 and machine-folded on a Stahl B20."

Division Five (Electronic Exhibitions)

Modern Books and Manuscripts unit at the Harvard University Houghton Library, for "Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200," Christoph Irmscher, curator; designed by Enrique Diaz and Leslie A. Morris; available online at http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/exhibits/longfellow/.

This is an exhibition perfectly calibrated to the audience described in the entry form: "Longfellow scholars and enthusiasts, those interested in American literature in general, and those interested in the development of European influences on American literature." The curator's task is to guide the generalists and to speak equally directly to specialists of various kinds, who will be paying minute attention to the approach taken and the nature of the sources by which the thesis of the exhibition is developed. That it has a definite thesis is one of its major strengths: "to represent Longfellow as he really was: not as the bogeyman of modernists wanting to exorcize the ghosts of their Victorian past, but as a consummate literary professional who became the most popular poet America has ever had." The exhibition, which draws on Longfellow holdings of the Houghton Library with highlights from the collections of the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge, Mass., is a pleasure to navigate: its "rooms" are clearly defined; the objects in them can be quickly glimpsed and examined more minutely in turn, in excellent digital rendition. Each item is precisely identified, and there are links to the Houghton's online catalog descriptions, as well as a general link to the finding aid for the collection. Initial presentations are compact, with clear provision for expansion on the order of "read more", etc. The curatorial voice in the text is that of an individual with a distinct style and deep knowledge of the subject, who can take an object and light it from various angles. The exhibition is, more generally, an excellent model for ways in which large bodies of digitally reproduced materials, with good metadata, can be selected and articulated within a meaningful space, a virtual gallery.