In spring 2025 Stanford University Libraries was pleased to celebrate student book collecting with the Wreden Prize for Collecting Books and Related Materials. This bi-annual prize showcases the creative and passionate love of collecting from undergraduate and graduate students at Stanford. Participating students each submit a bibliography of items in their collection, accompanied by an essay detailing the history and significance of the collection as a whole.
This year’s prize was highly competitive, with entries featuring a diverse group of collections including entries on Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, board game rule books, 20th-century maps of Vietnam, and more.
Luca Messarra, a doctoral student in English, won first prize and $2,000 for his essay, “Poddities: Select Works from the World of Print on Demand.” Messarra’s collection documents the literary-bibliographical history of print on demand (POD) and how publishing has been changed by the widespread availability of POD around the beginning of the 21st century, which “radically transformed publishing by making print runs as small as one or one hundred books economically viable.” His collection “traffics in the weird, the preposterous” examples of POD books, including experimental and pirated works. Understandably, many of these books are challenging to catalog and to present in a bibliography since many are reprints whose copyright page does not reflect the actual production of the POD book, and others lack information about their origin (information that is sometimes available elsewhere).
Ty Davidian, a PhD student in Italian, won second prize and $1,000 for his essay, “Thirty-Five Years of Bombastic Books and Revolting Art: A Futurist Collection.” In his essay, Davidian describes his fascination with the Futurists’ “radical experiments in typography and printing” and his frustration with the lack of access to their original works. He responded by becoming a collector of these materials and by beginning an extensive online archive/catalogue for Italian Futurism, with the eventual goal of growing the collection to the point where it can be a valuable scholarly resource.
Basil Baccouche, an MD student in the School of Medicine, won third prize and $500 for his essay “Uncoupling the Human Heart from Human Life: A Medical History.” In his essay, Baccouche traces the history of cardiac medicine and how the definition of death was changed from the heartbeat’s cessation to the lack of brain activity. His collection contains works on this history as well as rare original documents about early heart transplantation.
The jury for this year’s prize consisted of Bay Area collectors and antiquarian dealers Mary Crawford (Grolier Club member and collector); Chris Loker (antiquarian bookseller and specialist in children’s literature); Stephanie Kimbro-Dolan (First Bite Press); John Crichton (antiquarian bookseller); and Stanford librarians Regan Murphy Kao (Director, East Asian Library, Stanford University Libraries); and Eitan Kensky (Reinhard Family Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections, Stanford University Libraries).
The bi-annual Wreden Prize is open to all full-time Stanford students and was endowed in memory of William P. and Byra J. Wreden, two lifelong book collectors and supporters of Stanford University Libraries. In addition to building two remarkable personal collections focused on bibliographical materials and witchcraft, folklore, and magic, William Wreden was a well-known Bay Area antiquarian bookseller. Byra Wreden, his wife and partner, was also an avid collector, building a significant collection focused on children’s book illustrators such as Beatrix Potter and Kate Greenaway. For more information about the history of Wreden Prize and to read the prize-winning essays, please visit the Wreden Prize website.