2024 Anthony Davis Book Collecting Prize Winners announced!

We are delighted to announce the winners of this year’s Anthony Davis Book Collecting Prize, which was set up to encourage student book collectors at any London university. We received around twenty submissions representing a total of seven institutions, with collection themes ranging from military manuals from the Edwardian period to 20th-century lesbian literature and mountain and polar travel books

Results

Howard Kordansky won the first prize for his collection of books, pamphlets and ephemera relating to the Jewish experience in the First World War. The collection includes field prayer books, military passes, paybooks and field bibles. Many of the items are inscribed by or to the soldiers that owned them, and through painstaking research Howard has been able to identify several of these former owners und unearth some of their stories. This promising collection provides a fascinating insight into an under-documented aspect of 20th-century European history. Howard is studying for a BA Classics degree at UCL.

This year’s runner-up candidate is Anna Howard, who is studying for an MFA in Fine Art at the Slade School. Her collection, entitled “Self-Published: Artist Books and Bootlegging”, centres on DIY
culture and self-publishing. The books have all been self-published and in many cases made by hand, and they explore and subvert the nature of the book. The collection includes publications that Anna has sourced AT independent book fairs and from friends within the artists’ networks that she is part of, as well as some of her own work.

The other finalists were:

• Moog, Christine – She made her Mark: Women Working in the Print Trade
• Prater, Katherine – Teaching and Learning with Visual Materials
• Turnbull, Benjamin – A Window to the Edwardian Military World