Collecting, The Old-fashioned Way

Yale Prize-winners Shun Internet, Scour Used-book Shops Hoping For `Eureka!' Moments

March 31, 2007|By ADRIAN BRUNE; Special to the Courant

For Alexa Garvoille, it's all about the hunt.

The Yale University senior has traversed the aisles of used and rare bookstores across the country looking for her beloved volumes of Samuel Beckett. Refusing to buy on eBay or other auction houses, Garvoille, who has a modest but growing Beckett collection, has tracked down Beckett's old haunts for the Calder edition of the ``Collected Poems.'' She has staked out used bookstores in North Carolina to find ``Premier Amour,'' and she has scoured the shelves of Pittsburgh's Caliban Bookshop to pin down the English edition of ``Watt.''

Through it all, one Beckett book eluded her: his posthumously published early novel ``Dream of Fair to Middling Women.''

``I couldn't find it anywhere,'' the 21-year-old comparative-literature major said.

``It wasn't until I was back on the East Coast of the U.S. that I found it at a Borders, of all places. It had gone into print while it was away. I had looked all over Paris and London for this, and it was just at the Borders in Columbus Circle'' in New York.

In the same manner that Garvoille searches for books, the judges of the Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prizes annually explore the Yale student body for those with the best bibliophilic savvy and prowess. This year, the adjudicators of the 50th anniversary of the award, which honors seniors and sophomores whose collections demonstrate individuality, discovered Garvoille.

``Alexia's collection is memorable because she was methodical about trying to collect all the editions of Beckett's works over the years and read their French/English versions side-by-side for scholarly purposes, yet she did not search for books on the Internet, only in person, at bookstores,'' said judge Joseph Agostini. ``Now that's the sign of a purist book collector -- wanting to see and find the books yourself without tapping a few keys on the keyboard at online mega-stores of antiquarian books.''

In 1957, banker and bibliophile Adrian Van Sinderen established two prizes to encourage undergraduates to collect books, build up their personal libraries and read for both pleasure and education. Every year, about 30 seniors and sophomores whose own collections pertain to specific authors or interests; are based on specific features such as editions, illustrations and bindings; or represent the beginning of a well-rounded library compete to win $1,000 or $700, respectively, in the hopes the money will be used to add to their portfolios. The 2007 winners will be honored at a private dinner tonight.

Judges -- past winners, including antiquities dealer William Reese -- concentrate on the titles students have chosen related to their interest, not the monetary value of the books, the total number or, necessarily, their rarity.

``I think everyone who has won has likely shown a sustained, and more importantly, deep passion for their topic,'' said Agostini, a aficionado of Sherlock Holmes since middle school, who took the 1991 sophomore prize for his display of rare Holmes editions as well as 1993 senior prize for his collection of Christopher Morley, one of the founders of the Baker Street Irregulars and the Saturday Review of Literature.

``As most bibliophiles will tell you, the joy of pursuing a scarce `first edition' volume of a work or spotting that hard-to-find oddity on a hidden shelve in a bookstore is the hallmark of a budding collector.''

This year, the Van Sinderen prize pool teemed with literary sleuths (all women) and the judges decided to split the senior prize between Garvoille, whose bilingual Beckett array focuses on prose, poetry and plays in French and English, and Temidayo Olopade, for her works of contemporary writing of the ``Black Atlantic'' literary movement. Alexandra Marraccini won the sophomore prize for her collection entitled ``Forster-Auden-Isherwood: Six Degrees of Separation.''

``My aim is to debunk the stereotypes of rural, non-literate, non-aesthetic Africa, and to inform people that, yes, there is a young, vibrant and exploding print culture all across sub-Saharan Africa,'' Olopade said.

``There is so much out there to be read and discovered, and so many interesting books that have come out of this short century of continental independence,'' she said.

The daughter of Nigerian parents, Olopade lists among her favorites Derek Walcott's ``Omeros,'' an epic poem about Achille, an Achilles transported to the West Indies.

Her collection also includes Ngugi wa Thiong'o's ``Decolonising the Mind,'' which some critics have called the seminal work on the English language and its efficacy in African contexts, and musician and activist Sister Souljah's ``The Coldest Winter Ever,'' considered the first volley in the genre known as urban fiction.

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