The Goucher College Library has announced the winners of the Third Annual Applestein-Sweren Prize for book collecting, which was made possible by an endowment established in 2012 by Betty Applestein Sweren ’52 and Dr. Edgar Sweren.
The competition encourages Goucher students to read for enjoyment and to develop personal libraries throughout their lives; to appreciate the special qualities of printed or illustrated works; and to read, research, and preserve their collected works for pleasure and scholarship.
Annual prizes of $500, $250, and $150 are awarded to Goucher students who present thoughtfully constructed personal collections of books and related ephemera on any subject.
The winners of this year’s Applestein-Sweren Prizes are:
- Co-First Prize: Hannah Fenster ’15, “‘A Thousand Other Hearts’: Women Who Guide Me”
- Co-First Prize: Laura Williams ’17, “Collecting the Adoption Story, One Page at a Time”
- Second Prize: Michelle Tirto ’15, “Perspectives of the City”
- Third Prize: Emily K. Collins ’15, “‘Home Maker’: What it Was to be a Woman in Late Victorian America”
These winners will be honored on Friday, March 6, at 4 p.m. in the Batza Room of the Ungar Athenaeum. Selections from the winning collections will be on display. To attend this event, R.S.V.P. by February 27 to Randi Kennedy, assistant to the college librarian, at randalynn.kennedy@goucher.edu.
In addition to the cash prizes, winners will be given the opportunity to curate a small exhibition of their collections in the Goucher College Library. The first-prize winner also will be eligible for the $2,500 national prize awarded by the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest, sponsored by the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies, and the Center for the Book and the Rare Books and Special Collections Division.