Trisha Pasricha ’11, Gregory Scruggs ’08, and Ming Emily Vandenberg ’08
In March, when Harvard student Gregory Scruggs ’08 was on spring break in New Orleans, he discovered a general used bookstore called La Librairie d’Arcadie that had a great selection of books by Louisiana writers. Even better for Scruggs, it had a special section of French-language books by Louisiana authors—Cajun literature, black Creole literature, general books about the state and New Orleans—a boon for the
literature concentrator always on the lookout for francophone books. His venture is paying off: Scruggs has been awarded first prize in this year’s Visiting Committee Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting for his entry The Francophone Collection, while second prize went to Trisha Pasricha ’11 for Finding P. G. Wodehouse: Catalytic Legacies of My Grandfather’s India and third prize to Ming Emily Vandenberg ’08 for Representative Works in Science and the History of Science.
Scruggs only started his collection within the past two to three years, he said, attributing its origins to his Harvard classes and from studying abroad in France. He has acquired most of his 37-item collection from bookstores, and his favorite item is his copy of La Statue de Sel by Albert Memmi, a Tunisian-born French writer.
Second-place winner Pasricha, a VES concentrator, inherited the start of her P. G. Wodehouse collection from her Indian grandfather. Decades earlier, her grandfather had tried to join the military but found that the government would not take him because, although fluent in several languages, he didn’t speak English. So he decided to learn the language on his own using books, including a selection by Wodehouse.
Third-place winner Vandenberg traces her collection’s roots back to a trip to England. “I participated in a summer program at Oxford to learn about Charles Darwin and to physically retrace his footsteps through England,” she said. “We trekked across the hills of Wales because Darwin did.”
Students competing for the book collection prize were asked to submit an annotated bibliography and an essay that spoke to issues such as early collecting efforts, influence of mentors, the experience of searching for items, organization and care of items, and future direction of the collection. Fourteen students declared their intention to enter the competition and five submitted their work for consideration. The jury consisted of Heather Cole, Librarian of Lamont Library; Susan Fliss, Associate Librarian of Harvard College for Research and Instruction; and Alison Scott, Charles Warren Bibliographer for American Literature.
The Visiting Committee Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting was established in the spring of 1977 to recognize and encourage book collecting by undergraduates at Harvard. It is sponsored by the members of the Board of Overseers’ Committee to Visit the Harvard University Library. Cole, who has coordinated the competition since its inception, annually selects a jury with noted bibliographic expertise from among Harvard College Library staff.
An exhibition featuring items from the winners’ collections continues on the second and third floors of Lamont Library through May 2009.