Previous Winners and Example Collections

Previous Winners

2023-24: Thomas Rhys Clarke, 'The Left Book Club 1936-1948'

2022-23: Francesca Lutje-Wilkes, 'The Sparkling World of the Year 24 Group'

2021-22: Bartosz Skrzypczak, 'Roman and Anglican Liturgical Books'

2021-22: Discretionary second prize, Andie Saint-Rouge, 'Les Misérables and its Many Lives'

2020-21: George Young, 'Beagling'

2019-20: Karissa Adams, "Leonora Carrington"

Here, the winner from 2020, Karissa Adams, tells us more about her collection, and her experience of entering the competition:

"I began my book collection on Leonora Carrington shortly after I became aware of her in 2016, as I experienced a deep desire to know everything about her life and work. I was only now discovering her at the age of 23 after learning so much about other Surrealist artists at school, such as Salvador Dalí or André Breton, and I felt cheated for missing out on such a fantastic writer and artist. I initially set out to collect books by or about Carrington before including anthologies or collected works which contained one or two pieces of her writing. The collection also contains multiple editions of the same book because I wanted to compare and understand how publishers interpreted her work through book design or what was written in the introduction. The translation history of many of the texts are particularly significant, since some of the original texts have been lost, or they have been translated back and forth between French, English, and Spanish which were Carrington’s three main languages. What became apparent to me as my collection grew was the many different aspects of her life: her interest in the occult, her feminism, her friendships, her family, her politics. I also learned a great deal about other women, such as Remedios Varo or Kati Horna, through their friendships with Carrington, as well as her friendships with scholars such as Susan Aberth. 

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Entering the David Laing Prize has been a wholly positive experience, especially as I went on to win the ABA National Book Collecting Prize in 2021, and the application process helped me to really think about why I collected the books in the first place and what was interesting about the collection. I initially worried that the books would not be interesting to anyone else but me or that it lacked monetary value, since I had purchased a lot of used second-hand paperbacks for instance, but I have now realised that all you need to be a book collector is passion, enthusiasm, interest, and love for your subject matter. I would highly recommend entering your collection to the David Laing Prize, not just for the chance of winning, but to show off your enthusiasm and look at your books in a new light – you may discover ideas or stories within the collection that you never noticed before."

Example Collections

A book collecting prize doesn't always have to be about books.  Here we've asked one of our members of staff, Lauren, to select one of our collections that could be used as an example to enter the competition with.  Lauren chose our comic collections:

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"Reading is something I learnt quite late as a child as opposed to many of my peers. For a long time, I was uninterested in looking at books that didn’t contain any images or pictures. Even to this day, most of the books on my bookshelves will contain some sort of illustration or photograph. Having had quite a short attention span, but an insatiable craving for images and stories, I gravitated towards books which were short-form. And so it was, in those all-important childhood years, my lifelong love of comic books was born.

As you can imagine, most of the stores at Special Collections consist of stack after stack of books, and most of the books look to be, and indeed are, very old, very beautiful and very precious.

I remember my first tours of the stores as being some of the most spectacular and exciting events in my life. During one of these tours, my colleague Scott casually mentioned: “We have comic books here as well”.

“Comic books?!” I immediately asked to be shown where these were. I was dumbfounded. The last place I expected to see comic books was in the stores of a University’s Special Collections. I was even more surprised and even a bit confused when I saw what the collection consists of; The Spirit, Punisher, Sandman Midnight theatre, Ian Fleming's James Bond 007, Burke & Hare, to name a few! The story of how they ended up in Special Collections is obscure and there is no record of who may have previously owned them- they just sort of ‘turned up’ at one point or another in time (like many other collection items, as I would come to discover). When I asked our Rare Books Librarian about the comics, she recounted the long, and arduous journey it took to catalogue and properly store them (she went so far as to say they ‘defeated’ one rare books librarian, three cataloguers and one conservator). Although they were not consciously or purposely collected, they were kept because it was thought to be useful to have examples of different types of publications, in different formats, for teaching or display.

I’m not a big fan of the crime or superhero genre but I love that comic books exist at all within our collections. I guess this is why I’ve decided to write about them to promote the David Laing Book Collecting Prize. One important lesson I have learnt from working in Special Collections, is to ‘expect the unexpected’. You may have unknowingly built a collection up for years and think that it isn’t highbrow enough to share or write about, but you will be surprised. Take these comic books- they seem to be out of place and perhaps no one would have banked on them ending up in a secured, climate-controlled store in a university’s Special Collections. I myself never expected I would end up working in Special Collections at a University. Initially I was afraid I didn’t belong in such a well renowned and important space; I don’t have a degree and I have never been particularly academic. But I find myself reflecting almost daily on what a joy it is to work in a place where every day I can, and often do, learn something new, interesting and unexpected."