Announcing the winners of the 2023 Andrew T. Nadell Prize for Book Collecting

We are pleased to announce the winners for the 2023 Andrew T. Nadell Prize for Book Collecting. The submitted collections were creative and inspiring and the judges found it challenging to select the winners.

In the Undergraduate category, Javah Xie, a Computer Science and Philosophy major, won first place for their collection “A Philosopher’s Collection; Or, A Collector’s Philosophy.” Second place went to Lily Elman, a Trinity Program II major studying Disabled Bodies as Minority Bodies in Theory and Practice, for her collection “The Wounded Storyteller: Disability, Illness, and Memoir.” And Rebecca Schneid, an English major, won honorable mention for her collection “Barely Hidden, Yet Always Here: Queer Poetics and Queer Poetic Influences.”

In the Graduate/Professional Schools category, first place went to Joshua Shelly, a doctoral candidate in the Carolina-Duke German Studies Program, for his collection “Alte Bücher in Haifa: (Re)building a German Jewish Library in the 21st Century.” Merlin Ganzevoort, also a doctoral candidate in the Carolina-Duke German Studies Program, won second place for his collection “Turbayne, Morris, and Thomson: A Collection of Victorian Book Art.”

In addition to cash prizes ($1,500 for first, $750 for second, $500 for honorable mention), all six winners will receive any in-print Grolier Club book of their choice and a three-year membership in the Bibliographical Society of America.

Since 1947, the Duke University Libraries have awarded the prize in alternate years to promote reading for enjoyment and the development of students’ personal libraries.  In recent years, winners of the Andrew T. Nadell Prize for Book Collecting have gone on to place highly at the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest, hosted by the Library of Congress. The Andrew T. Nadell Prize for Book Collecting is named for Dr. Andrew T. Nadell M’74, who began collecting rare books when he was a student at Duke.  He now collects early books and manuscripts on the learned professions and skilled trades, an expansion of his earlier interest in medicine as a profession.  With his wife, Eleanore Edwards Ramsey, he also collects the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival.  He credits his interest in rare books to two of his mentors at Duke, Professor of Medical Bibliography G.S.T. Cavanagh and Professor of the History of Medicine Gert H. Brieger. We greatly appreciate Dr. Nadell’s support of this prize.