>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> Pam Jackson: So, I'm Pam Jackson, I'm director for the Center for the Book here at the Library of Congress. We are part of the library's newly created national and international outreach unit and I welcome you and thank you for being here. To our partners and colleagues cosponsoring today's events, to the program participants and to our speakers, to collectors, to friends, to each of you tonight thank you for joining us, thank you for giving us your attention and being generous with us. The library's central mission is to provide the American people with a rich, diverse, enduring source of knowledge, one that can be relied upon to inform and inspire and engage people to support their intellectual and creative endeavors. And a part of our vision here at the library is that we are the chief steward of the record of knowledge for America and thus the world, creating a springboard to the future. It's a future that I hope to be one of compassion and courage and industry and excitement and remarkable accomplishment and achievement, and one of tolerance and acceptance. And so, today's collectors in their own rights are part of our goal and hope and desire for stewards of records of knowledge and I applaud you in your commitment and you celebrate the accomplishments that will be shared tonight. Here, at the Center for the Book, which includes the Poetry and Literature Center and the Young Readers Center we promote books and libraries, literacy and reading, poetry and literature because we believe beyond a shadow of a doubt is the best way to empowerment, to enlightenment, to educate and inform societies, to protect and uphold democracy. We believe more than anything else books and reading are the best weapons against ignorance and intolerance and we thank you for being part of our mission of service and fulfilling on the promotion of knowledge and the inspiration that books bring us. It's my job and my honor to introduce our next speaker in the program John Cole, John Y. Cole. Historian of the Library of Congress, more importantly the founding director of the Center for the Book which is celebrating its 40th year in existence next year. With just the deepest gratitude John for you and your role here at the library what you've created and what's to come, thank you for creating this event tonight and for leading us the way forward. Welcome John Y. Cole. [ Applause ] >> John Cole: Thank you Pam. As you can see, I'm still easing my way out of the Center for the Book, but very excited about being the Library of Congress' first historian. And one of the things I can record is the success of a program such as this one of which has been transferred to the Library of Congress in recent times. I want to say just a quick word about this awards program. In 2005, the magazine Fine Books and Collections started this program and competition to honor and to award student book collectors and they went along very well, but eventually some of the other people in the book world, including people who are eager to become involved agreed that we would take over in a new partnership the sponsorship of the awards program for certain here at the Library of Congress, but also with other partners the administration of the program. And our purpose always has been to kind of broaden the reach and to get more schools and more students and more people involved in book collecting. The purpose really is to honor young collectors which we're doing tonight and kind of push them gently and maybe not so gently into becoming lifetime book lovers and accomplished collectors and even bibliophiles if they aren't careful. So that's one of the ways that we are bringing several groups together for the sponsorship of this. If you look at your program which you may have missed the other sponsors are the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies, and the Grolier Club and we are very grateful to all of them and also to the contributors and supporters and friends who've made financial contributions at various levels to this program. We hope that you like it, we hope you continue to support it and we promise that we will continue to bring you very high-quality winners which we are doing tonight and I think you will enjoy meeting them and learning about what they are able to think about as collectors, it's really quite amazing. I would like to welcome the Grolier Club as our latest partner in this partnership and president Scott Clemons is here and Scott would like to say a few words. Scott. There you are. >> Scott Clemons: Here I am. Thank you, John. I just -- the Grolier Club, how many of you know of the Grolier Club? Oh, this warms my heart to see this, thank you that makes my day to see that. The Grolier Club was founded in 1884 originally as a club for private collectors of books and since then it's broadened a great deal to include institutional collectors as well. Anyone tangibly involved in the book arts, so there are bookmakers, there are typographers, there are still a healthy dose of private collectors such as myself. So, as sponsors of this award it just makes all the sense in the world for the club to meet collectors early on and introduce them to the resources the club has to offer, most of which are people who have been in this passion for 10 or 30 or 50 or 60 or more years as collectors. So, one of the things that we did last year and that we're doing again this year is that we are to each of the four honorees offering a year's membership in the Grolier Club with all the rights thereunto appertaining as the lawyers would say. And we hope to see those people at the club and the various events that the club does, including quite a few here in DC. There are number of club members in the greater DC area. We do three or four events a year here in DC and nationwide, and increasingly even worldwide as well. And as a matter fact I would invite all of you to come to the Grolier Club in spite of being a private club on 60th Street in Manhattan it is also open to the public six days a week with exhibitions and two different galleries, public lecture series, a research library. So, stop by and when you do ask for me and if I'm there I'll say hello to you. So, thank you again for letting us be a part of this and it's a privilege for us to be a part of this and thank you John as well. >> John Cole: Thank you. Thank you. >> Scott Clemons: Thanks. >> John Cole: And tonight, I'd like to offer a special thank you to ABAA and especially to Susan Benny who has carried the administrative burden for this contest and has kept everyone in line and has had many wonderful ideas that we do our best to incorporate, don't we Susan? And we talk about other ideas and it's interesting that with the Grolier Club of course there's a concern about young collectors, with our organizations there's a concern about young collectors and this is an alliance I think that all of us involved in are working on. The other partner within the Library of Congress is the Rare Book and Special Collections Division and at this time I'd like to introduce Mark Dimunation. Mark is the judge on the part of the Library of Congress, but Mark is more than that. Mark also is part of the package that winners get when they arrive here and get a program this afternoon, it was held at the Rare Book and Special Collections Division having Mark talk about a few of the treasures, we have a few books and things based on collecting and Mark does that so well and I know everyone there appreciates it. I'd ask Mark to say a word or two before we move ahead with our speaker about the process of judging and come on Mark you can cover it up pretty well, come on. Let's give Mark a hand. [ Applause ] >> Mark Dimunation: Thank you. imagine the terrified look on their faces when they're informed I'm part of the package. Welcome everybody, it's a lovely event and for those of us in the rare book in the world this is always exciting because we know we're looking at the future of collections across America, whether they land in Goucher or the Library of Congress so that we're still talking. I want to give you a sense of what it's like to participate on the end of actually reading a variety of essays from young collectors who are talking about the reasons behind why they collect, how they collected, what prompted them to begin. For those of us who live with rare book collections of course this is the story we tell of almost everything we have in the division, so it's a very familiar tale to be told. But I just want to give you a sense of what we were coping with just in the spirit of the four prizewinners today. Imagine if you will in the reading of more than a dozen essays that include lists of books. These are the people who have filtered through their local competitions, that have come to a national competition, that have then been sifted through to a final round and that's when the final judges step in to read. There are other people in the room here who are participating in this conversation and they can back me up. It's kind of a wild ride that we go on in part because we're confronting in some cases materials that we're very familiar with and we want to see the particular take of the collector. In other cases, as is the case with the first-place prizewinner, we were introduced to someone we've never heard of. And so, we're introduced to not only the topic but also the notion of collecting for the first time afresh. So, in the range of the conversations imagine making a decision between the collection of a particular individual who comes from Mobile along the southern coast compared to a collection on Sacco and Vanzetti and finally, to the stories of resistance during Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, and then finally a collection of sailboats from somebody who lives in New Mexico. And to try and wrap your head around these what it means is diving deep into these essays, which are extremely important to the understanding and I think, I suspect may actually be helpful to the young collectors as they're being asked to explain maybe for the first time what started them and why they collect now. So, Megan who collected the Sacco and Vanzetti books talks about her first introduction to the trial and then sort of running into conflicting information and the bother that that creates for her and the effort to sort of set the story right. Whereas, Micaela who's writing about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, discovering that there's a great deal of material from the period but not so much about resistance and the need to keep that story alive. Until we get to Luke's story about Eugene Walter, king of the monkeys which I have to confess I kind of moaned when I read the title I thought he's collecting a naturalist. Well, it couldn't be further from the truth. Eugene Walter is an amazing individual and we had quite a ride and ultimately Luke's collection landed in first place, not just because of the nature of Mr. Walter himself who affiliated himself from anything from Peggy Guggenheim to the film Innovate and a Half to writing cookbooks to talking about Alabama to going back and forth to writing about his life, one book of which is called the Untidy Pilgrim. It's an amazing ride of an individual and you'll hear more about that later. So, it's a difficult decision to be made, this is how we make that judgment. How true to the topic and to the goal and the mission of their collecting are these collectors and that's when the prizewinners very quickly sort themselves out from the other contributors, all of whom are writing about interesting collections. But what we find in the four that have been given awards today is a real passion not just for the subject, but also for collecting. And it's the combination of the two, of adding some sort of material reality to the interest of the topic that they're writing about that makes them true collectors in the minds of those of us who live with these on a daily basis. These are very erudite essays in many cases and I can say this an old man now, it makes one proud of the next generation who are writing in full sentences about books and that just warms my heart. It was lovely to have three of the four here today to talk about slightly more polished collectors in a way, giving them a sense of the family that they've joined as collectors and the continuity in the world of books of people seeking out books because they love them as things, because they love them as ideas, because they love them as something that's come to us from another person and the stories that they reveal. So, imagine for a moment, sitting on the phone with several individuals staking your claim around a particular topic and you have a sense of what it must be like to be a judge in this competition. So, congratulations to everybody. [ Applause ] >> John Cole: Well as Mark hinted, one person cannot be with us today and we're sorry. The essay prize winner Samantha Flitter from Princeton University she wrote her essay and Mark referred to it, the Sand and the Sea and Age of Sail Library, Sail Libraries, reading about sailboats in rural New Mexico. So, she had quite a story and wrote about it very well and I'm sorry she isn't here tonight, but she was unable to make it. However, it's my pleasure now to introduce an individual who besides loving books and quite obviously food, which we will hear much more about is also an award-winning author, a journalist, a teacher and a community activist. Toni Tipton-Martin is a very busy person building a healthier community for all of us through her books, her teaching and classes and now her own foundation. She has been invited twice by First Lady Michelle Obama to the White House for her outreach to help families live happier and healthier lives. And she received the 2014 Southern Foodways Alliance John Egerton prize for this work. With the Egerton prize's seed money over the past June 16th weekend in Austin, Texas Toni hosted Soul Summit, a conversation about race, identity, power and food. It was and sounds like it must've been an unprecedented three-day meeting. Among her other activities and honors Toni is the author of the Jemima Code, two centuries of African-American cookbooks published last year by the University of Texas Press. It's an award-winning bibliography and too late for this listing, but with the cards from the winter here are a couple of other acknowledgments of this book. Here's one of the reviews, the New York Times book review, Jemima code is no ordinary book, it's a heaping helping, a long-overdue acknowledgment. From NPR's Best Books of 2005, it is a rare coffee table book that serves up important history and compelling imagery and digestible bite-size chunks. You can see there's a big opportunity there for similes and many other things. I'm not going to talk about her collection, she's going to talk a little bit about it I think in relation with the book. But the Jemima Code is also the title of her blog and a traveling exhibit which features larger-than-life images of black cooks at work taken from Toni's gallery of authors which she will tell us about. In 1991, she was the first African-American woman to hold the position of food editor at a major daily American newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She's been a guest instructor at Whole Foods Culinary Center and appeared on cooking channels, Foodography and the PBS feature Juneteenth There it is Again Jamboree. Toni, I'm exhausted, help get me out of this jam. Here is Toni Tipton-Martin. [ Applause ] >> Toni Tipton-Martin: Thank you so much, thank you. Hi. So ordinarily speakers you know we begin with what an honor and a privilege it is to be here but really, I have to say I am a little silly giddy, I'm so excited to be here. This is the place where my work in some ways began and so the ability to read the winning essays as a journalist and a reporter, as an amateur collector and to read your passion and to see some of myself in your writing it makes me emotional, it was just really a privilege and it is a privilege to be here. So, thank you so much for having me. I've passed around a copy of the card, not because I'm so vain that I want you to see the back with all of the awards, my publisher did that. But I'd like to begin really the way that I begin everywhere. This is the first opportunity that I've had to speak in a new family, a family of collectors, a family that is making me feel a bit of confidence about what I've just experienced. I speak to so many groups, food people primarily, but I will be speaking at Duke for example next week and so there are always people that have a different kind of an interest in my material than people who are not necessarily focused on African-American history or Foodways studies, but as collectors. And so, what I've given is the card that I'm traveling around with and I ask everybody to take a minute to look at the cover. This is the cover of the book. This is the book, but it doesn't have the dust jacket on it. So, this is the dust jacket that would be there, how about that? Take a peek and now just for a moment notice that you're having a reaction to the cover. It's a little easier when it's a slide or when it's bigger, but each of us individually is having a reaction to this picture. Whether you recognize the image as a woman who might've been a caretaker in your community, in your family. There might be a sense of pride connected to memories associated with this woman. There might even be a sense of shame for some people that I speak to regarding this image. Whether that is African-Americans or white people we all have a reaction. And there's even a reaction by young people who don't have any idea who she is and what I'm talking about because you see packages with faces on them all the time. But the reason I ask everyone to take a moment is that in our daily busy lives we go through life having reactions to things and we're not always aware of them. We're being spoken to a lot now about mindfulness right, everybody's talking about being mindful and paying attention. And so, my work centers on using food as a tool for racial reconciliation, that's my primary purpose. It's why I won the Egerton prize and other great things that have happened. And prejudice occurs one affront at a time and so my goal with writing the Jemima Code was the hope that we could restore an image that has been used in multiple ways to distract us, to divide us, to degrade one population and use that image in a way that by the time you get to the end of my work we're all in the same place. So even though we might start somewhere differently we will all wind up in the same place. So, I won't even ask how many of you have seen the Jemima Code. But the Jemima Code is a bibliography, an annotated bibliography and it is the story of my rare black book collection. I'm an amateur accidental collector, I collected these books as a reporter on a story. My goal in writing this book as I've said was to describe each one of these authors in a unique and unbiased way so that by the time we get to the end of the book we're all in the same place. If you can't see it in the back, there's a little black girl and a little white girl and they're going off into the sunset. And this is an image taken from one of the books from 1978. Two authors got together, a white woman and a black woman in Louisiana and they published a book with the same motive that I have. I just love that. So, I'm going to save one of these pages because when I look for it when speaking I always lose it. So, as I said, I was a journalist in pursuit of a story. I was the nutrition writer for the Los Angeles Times many years ago, some 30 years ago and I was busy organizing the cookbooks and working with the recipes in the collections, in the archives in the department and I noticed that there were no African-American cookbooks there. But not only did I notice there were no cookbooks there I noticed that those references to African-Americans were usually very disparaging. They made reference to this Aunt Jemima character, a mythological figure that has lingered in American history, southern history, in literature, in film. You will recognize her as the nanny figure in many of the -- in everywhere right in Southern history. And I was looking for my grandmother on the pages of Southern history and I wasn't able to find her there and certainly not in the way that I would recognize her. And so, I had this idea that I would interview elderly African-American women about their true-life experiences and hopefully be able to share with the rest of the world, the passion and the intelligence and the knowledge and the wisdom that I experienced in my own community through these women. And I told a couple of people that I had that idea and other books came out. I'm not from the South I'm from Los Angeles, so I told people for example that I was going to do this book by traveling the South and going to black churches and that's how I would find these women. And lo and behold somebody came out with a book on black recipes from black churches in the South. So, I learned to keep my idea about my next book very, very close to the best. As a matter fact, so many of my friends who are scholars who once this book finally came out I received so many e-mails from people saying we had no idea what you were doing. They knew I was working on something, but not something at this level of beauty. So anyway, I was there at the Times and I thought I would interview all these women and then I realized I didn't have really any access to women in the South. And one day there was a little book, it's the one on the bottom if you can see in the back, it's called the New Orleans Cookbook by Lena Richard, it was published in 1985 and this is a paperback edition of this book. It appeared in a book giveaway, at the Times as reporters we weren't allowed to take anything for free and so we would give away books that came in as review copies so that others could share in those readings. And so, this book, Lena Richard's book showed up in this pile. And so, I didn't quite know what I was going to do with it, there was no photograph of the woman in there, but it was called New Orleans and even though I know Southern food and Creole food are very, very different I thought well it might help me in some way. So, I took this book home, I put it on my shelf with all of my other cookbooks and it sat there for quite a number of years, probably about 10 years. And then I was attending an event in Atlanta and John Egerton whose name, in whose name the award that I received was given was a Southern sage civil rights writer, a very important man in the writings of the South. And he had just returned from a visit to the Library of Congress and I heard him speak and he spoke eloquently about the women in my community. He spoke about African-American women and their contributions to American society in particular through food. And I was astounded, I hadn't heard anyone speak that way. And so, I ran over to the groupie gaggle that was hanging around him, I had no idea who he was, but obviously everyone else did. And I had shared that with him that I had no idea, I'd never heard anyone speak that way. And he said I've just returned from the Library of Congress and I have something in my briefcase for you, meet me in the press room. And so, I waited for him in the lobby of the press room of the hotel and he went through his briefcase and he had this disheveled stack of wrinkled pages from a book from 1912 called the Kentucky Cookbook by a colored woman. He said he didn't know what he was supposed to do with it, but obviously it was intended for me and so he gave me that copy of the book. I have to go by year to find it. So, I had this stack of papers and again I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do with it. But gradually I started thinking more and more about cookbooks as a mechanism for telling a story. I still didn't realize that they could be a tool that would change social history and improve the status and the perception of an entire group of people. I really was still just in pursuit of my own story. So, another couple of years go by and now Egerton and I are talking about other content and I encounter a book called the Bluegrass Cookbook and it was published in 1904 by a white woman named Minnie Fox and her brother John C. Fox was a writer for the Atlantic. And they published this book and again as John Egerton had done, they gave credit to these African-American women and they did that with images. So not only did they attribute recipes to these people in a way that was not a caricature or a disparaging image like that plantation era mammy that I was seeing throughout history all of a sudden here was a group of white people from Kentucky who had the same kind of passion that Egerton and I both had for these historic women. And so, we approached the University of Kentucky Press and they agreed to republish that book and facsimile with a new introduction by me. And that brought me to my second time and visit here at the -- that brought me to my visit here, my first visit to the Library of Congress in the late 1990's. I came here and dug into the archives to explore African-American writings to try to understand who in their right mind the turn-of-the-century would've written a book with a title by a colored woman, it didn't make much sense to me. And so, I set out to understand more about black cookbooks. And while I was here I encountered several of the rare books, rare African-American books that are here in the collection and then I was hooked, like I mean like as they say mainline, I don't know should I say that. I started telling people my passion and people who traveled around the country would bring books back to me when they were on vacation. They would bring back little $2 pamphlets that they encountered in secondhand stores and books just started sort of coming to me. And I didn't really know how to become a collector in earnest, but the internet changed my life. The University of Alabama has I think what is the largest collection of African-American cookbooks, the William Lupton collection. And this book, this collection has some 450 books in it and that number is comprised of duplicates, multiple editions, there are some in facsimile, and there is a large number of books there that are community cookbooks right, that I would never be able to get in my local, in my area. And so, I used that book as a shop, that list as a shopping list and I started entering titles of books into the browser at bookfinder.com and I just would wait every now and then for something to pop up. One of the first books that I was just determined to have was a book from 1936, it was called Eliza's Cookbook. It's the yellow one, I was desperate to have this book because it was -- it's called Eliza's Cookbook, Favorite Recipes Compiled by the Negro Culinary Art Club of Los Angeles. So, I'm from Los Angeles and there I started to have an idea of who my grandmother was in print on the page. She was a lovely woman and she was talented and she was intelligent and she wasn't at all this disparaging thing that I had seen so often on the pages of history and I had to have this book. Now keep in mind, I was a stay-at-home mother taking my kids back and forth to swimming and I was doing this in secret. My husband until I started this tour had no idea how much I had really been investing in these books. And so, I entered the title on an eBay auction, the book popped up for $1. And I was exhilarated, but I didn't know anything about eBay, so I went next-door to talk to my neighbor who was a fanatic about eBay and she taught me all of the secrets. She taught me how to set my clock to make sure that the tick-tock timing on my watch matched their countdown clock. She told me not to enter the title, not to enter my interest or my bid because then others would know there was a value to this book that had shown up for $1. And so, I waited until the two-minute warning that she gave me and then and I had been watching the number sort of tick up and it was somewhere you know in the couple hundred dollars. I thought I can live with that I'll call my mom something like that. And so, I typed in my bid and then I closed my eyes and pushed the button, you know like he's going to kill me. So, I entered $400 and then you wait and it seems like you're waiting forever. But the note, the little blinking notice came back and said you've won and I was so excited, but I was also terrified like I'm going to send $400 to a stranger that I don't know and I have no way to know if this book is authentic, I don't know what condition, you know I don't know anything. But I was determined to have a book that put my grandmother in this category. I called the woman in San Diego and apparently, she had been cleaning out her grandmother's attic and found this book, had no idea the value and she was you know just astounded at what she was about to earn for this book. And so, my life went on like that for years. I just kept entering more and more titles and every time something popped up, it didn't matter they were at that point not very expensive, so I was still paying very small amounts for the books and really no amount of money mattered I had to have these books. And the longer that I collected them the more that they started to organize themselves as one of the essayists wrote into a social history that I was able to tell a whole new story for the women who had cooked in America's kitchens, who had been so badly disparaged in history and all of a sudden, I had the ability to break what I started calling the Jemima Code. So, I went to publishers, I had a literary agent, I had 25 years in the food industry, so I was pretty well known, nobody would buy this book. I proposed it as a beautiful coffee table book that would have photographs of all of the women inside. I wanted everyone to fall in love with them just in the way that I did and nobody cared. So, I found myself in the same predicament that my ancestors had been in and many of these books were self-published. Some of them are pamphlets, some of them were even published by manufacturers who were trying to get people to buy more of their products. Some of them were books published by universities on behalf of the cook who had been feeding the athletic team. There was a food editor who worked for Ebony Magazine and she was asked by Carnation to produce a recipe collection on their behalf using recipes, Carnation recipes in the 1940's. And so, as I went along I just kept collecting and trying to convince a literary agent or a publisher to buy this book. And in my frustration even though I am a journalist I decided to just take the project to the internet, the place where I had really -- that had saved the collection, I wanted to take the books back there. And so, I started a blog reluctantly and I was going to tell the story of every one of these authors and so I wrote that this would be a one-year project and if people received them the way that I did then I'd keep going with it. And I really just abandoned the idea of publishing this book. And then the University of Texas encountered the website and they came to me and said we want to publish that book under one condition. And I said sure what and they said we want it to be a beautiful coffee table book. I thought I was going to die. Really, this is what they envisioned, they wanted a book about books. They wanted, they understood my passion and my desire to really change the representation, to change the written history of African-American women who had worked in this country. And we knew that if we started with recipes people wouldn't get it yet, people would think all kinds of things. So, we knew that we just had to validate that the women even existed first. And there are books in this collection that are co-authored by black-and-white women as you can see here, this book is from the 80's, Viola's Favorite Recipes. There are books that have incredible illustrations inside of them. If you can see Ma Chance's book on Caribbean French cooking. There are others like her who give us very detailed illustration of how to chop a certain dish or how this guy in 1970, 1972 this is a diet book published for African-American, for people in general and he gives four weeks' worth of menus and does things that we think about already, like telling you how much is a serving size of pasta for example on this page. And so, what this book started to do was really reveal an intelligence that hadn't ever been associated with African-American cooks before. We had previously been either acknowledged as great cooks because we came by that knowledge naturally with some kind of a natural instinct. Some authors in the 20's even described as having sort of a voodoo magic that we cooked with, it's very insulting and complimentary at the same time right. Again, that's the messaging of a code that it speaks to us all very differently. And so, it became evident that there was an intelligence here and there was also a social arc. So, I've been able to divide my content now by generations of women and I've been able to extract characteristics and values that have not been identified before. For example, in 1827 the oldest book in the collection, I won't go through them all, but I do like to just wrap up with the 19th century authors. In 1827, Robert Roberts wrote The House Servant's Directory. He was the butler in the governor's mansion in Massachusetts and he writes a book that is essentially a training manual for future generations of workers. History would have portrayed this book as just another way to create more servants. It would have continued to disparage the idea that African-Americans had any knowledge, but this is a love letter. The way that he has written to his charges about their work is so profoundly intimate and smart. He speaks to them about punctuality and proper dress and decorum on the job. He even talks to them about keeping your feet clean, which I thought was really interesting. I have a really great story about collecting right. So, this book, this was a book about women as the title implies because there is a history associated with men, Thomas Jefferson had a black chef that he had trained in France as did George Washington, so there are stories about black men, but there are no stories about black women. And so, I wasn't really looking for Robert Roberts, but I was in New York City and I called a book dealer and I said hey, I'm here do you have anything you know that maybe I don't have and she said everybody knows you have everything already. And I said well there's a couple of first editions I'm looking for and so she said well okay what and so I told her I wanted this one and she said call me back in 10 minutes. So, I called her back in 10 minutes and she said can you come over here in the village they're bringing you the book. Like what do you mean they're bringing me the book and so she said just come over here they're bringing you the book. So, a disheveled guy who was like obviously working in this man's home came in the store with a crumpled grocery bag in his hand and he handed it to Bonnie and Bonnie handed it to me and we opened it and this book in first edition from 1827 was inside of that bag and I collapsed. I had an immediate connection to these people in a way that I haven't been able to explain to any other audience right. Everyone else just thinks oh yeah, you did a great job, you changed history. You know there's something very unique and special about the intimate relationship between a collector who is in pursuit of their passion for whatever that reason, whether it's a social history that you want to change or whether it's just for your own incredible knowledge. So, I will tell you about two more, maybe three, I have four minutes, I can do it in three minutes. So, this one, this is my first holding of this one and I'm shivering up here if you can't see it and I have been for the last hour since Mark gave it to me. This lovely little book is from 1848 and was published by this man Tunis Campbell and among his accolades, he's responsible for the drill that you have experienced at hotels and banquet service when the waitstaff is all located kind of around the room and then they wait until the exact right moment and they march out and they remove the cover of the dish. He's part of why we do that, it was actually a military drill that he incorporated in his hotel service. And so, I use little stories like that to try to encourage the next generation of young people that there are so many incredible opportunities in the food world that don't have to do with food service or cooking or being a chef, that there is lots of other ways that we can uplift young people from poverty using the food industry. This is a really wonderful book, the only copy of this book that we know of is in the archives at the University of Michigan. This is the first known cookbook, the other two were hotel manager books, but this is the first recipe collection from 1866. And what is compelling about this book and what I tell young people is that this was a free woman of color who had to, she had a handicapped child, she had been robbed twice and she was using food as a tool for her own uplift. She started a catering company, she had a boarding house. And so, what I like to tell people about her and about the next women Abby Fisher is that they were women who were entrepreneurs and we don't tend to think of African-American women in the kitchen as entrepreneurs, but these are women who used food to achieve economic independence right. Abby Fisher was a woman who had been enslaved in North Carolina and she and her husband relocated to San Francisco where she operated, they operated a pickles and preserves company. And that she won multiple awards for her pickles and so the white women in her community, both of these women, they rallied around these women and they helped them get their books published. The first time I actually saw this book was at the Schlesinger Library and I guess that's as good a place as any to wrap up to say that along the way I was using my reporter skills to aggregate, to understand, to represent these people, but I didn't quite know about collecting. And I attended a seminar at Radcliffe that taught me how to read a cookbook without the bias of race or gender and how to look at the nuances of print and paper and ink and choice of color, and those cute little squiggles that I'm certain you guys know exactly what the name of it is that are on every page. And I learned a lot about collecting from that session. So, I'll leave you with where we started. Lena Richard remember her, the book that I took out of the collection? It turns out, I guess I should memorize the page these books are on, it turns out that that little paperback had been reproduced three or four different times by Lena. And the first time was 1939 and she published the book by herself, it was a self-published book, she was an entrepreneur and a restaurateur in New Orleans and she had her own television show before Julia Child did in 1941. So, Miss Lena published her book in 1939 and James Beard, the great father of American cooking learned of her book and he approached his publisher and asked them to reissue the book for her, which they did in 1940. And so, the book -- oh, that's right it's not in 80's it's in 30's, they did that for her, only they changed the title. So, the top book is the blue book Lena Richard's book, she calls it Lena Richard's New Orleans Cookbook. One year later the book appears as New Orleans Cookbook by Lena Richard and this beautiful self-portrait of her has been removed and what appears on the backside of this is the same mammy disparaging image despite her efforts to include a photograph of herself in the view that she thought she had. So, I just want to wrap up and say that as collectors you have an incredible opportunity not just for all of your own interests, but to really make a difference socially. So, thank you so much for inviting me. [ Applause ] >> John Cole: Well Toni, that was wonderful, I had not heard her speak about this before and I think I could hard to imagine a better introduction to hearing other stories from collectors. When we first met tonight I said I wanted to introduce her as a collector, she said oh no, no I'm an accidental collector and I just kind of backed off a little bit, not knowing I said okay you tell us about your collecting career in the way that you would like to and she did and she did a terrific job. Let's give her another round of applause. [ Applause ] And now we move to our newer collectors and we actually are going to award the prizes, we're going to have Micaela Beigel come up first, Beigel I'm sorry, who is our third prize winner and she is going to talk for just a few minutes about her collection. It's one that was mentioned earlier, Once We Were Dreamers, a Collection of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust. Let's give her a hand and we will hear from her and then we will take a picture with people from Goucher College as soon as we've heard from our winner. Thank you. >> Yes, thank you. Hi, I'm Micaela, I'm a sophomore at Goucher College, which is about an hour from here. I didn't know I'd be speaking, so I didn't prepare anything so this is off-the-cuff, but it's fine. So, I grew up in a Zionist Jewish youth movement called Habonim Dror, which is one of the first Zionist youth movements that emerged after the Jewish enlightenment in Europe which is called the Haskalah and it was the move from orthodoxy to secularism that occurred. When Jews realized that they didn't need to stay in the shtetl and that they could be something more than that. And famously Habonim Dror was the movement that produced two of the leaders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. And two years ago, I went to Poland with my youth movement and we visited the site of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, one of the sites, the final resting place so to say and I felt very connected with it. So, all my life I felt like I'm a Jewish person who's not very observant but is very connected spiritually to Jewish history and Jewish culture. And you know that distinction was hard for me to accept because you know when you go to Jewish day school they sort of tell you that the way into Judaism is through the Torah and didn't I feel that and this was it and more specifically it was Jewish women. And Jewish women who were artists and poets and thinkers and who are more than just Jewish women. And you know that's where the collection really started, it started with some really important Jewish women and their names are Hannah Szenes who is an Israeli paratrooper and poet and Zivia Lubetkin who was the leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and so many more who tell these amazing stories about Jewish resistance, which is the idea that there will be life after this. And that is really what I wanted to bring to the collection, that there will be life for Jewish people after this. >> John Cole: Thank you. We're going to take our picture down here. [ Applause ] And I would like, is your mother here? Yes, please come up and join us for the photo and presentation. [ Inaudible Comment ] And we're going to be joined -- yes, the guests from Goucher and also Ken is joining us, this is the. And so, I'm going to be [inaudible], let's do this right. >> They want us over here, sorry [inaudible]. >> John Cole: I'm going to be presenting this to you. [ Multiple Speakers ] Look at the camera. All right, thank you very much. [ Applause ] Our second prize winner is Megan Jones from the University of Kansas. Her collection is about the life and times of Sacco and Vanzetti. Megan. There you are. [ Applause ] You have some people here that you'd like to [inaudible]. >> Megan Jones: My mother's here. >> John Cole: Okay we'll get her up for the picture. >> Megan Jones: Hello. First of all, thank you, this is a really awesome opportunity and I never would've thought that I would be here for this so thanks. My collection is on Sacco and Vanzetti and I got started with this because -- well I guess it really started for me in high school because I saw a picture of them in the corner of my history textbook and I asked my teacher in Oklahoma who are they and he said, oh they're not really important don't worry about it. And so, I didn't look them up, but I remembered their name and then a couple years later I was at Indiana University in Bloomington and I took a class at the Lilly Library on working with modern literary archives and I saw their name in the finding aid so I requested the material. And I was reading through their letters and I was like these are so cool, I wonder if they've been published. So, I found the 1928 edition of the letters and said whoa, these are not accurate at all. And there were a lot of omissions and things were changed and so I started trying to learn everything I could about them and started buying books about them. So that's how that started and then one book would lead to another book which would lead to another book. But the most recent thing I've got was John Dos Passos Facing the Chair, which is about both of them from a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas where I attend now who had passed away. The executor of his estate was giving away his books and he had an entire garage full of books and they were just trying to get rid of them and so I asked her if she had this book and she said no, it's not in here. And then I got a phone call two months later and she's like oh here we have it do you want it? So, I met her at a coffee shop and she gave it to me and it was signed by the son of the Sacco Vanzetti defense committee to the professor. So, it's kind of exciting how these things happen and I like hearing other people's stories so excited to hear what's next. But thank you. [ Applause ] [ Inaudible Comment ] >> John Cole: I'd like to invite Megan's mother up for the photo and Pam and myself and we'll do a repeat. Let's go down here. Are you going to smile this time? [ Giggling ] [ Inaudible Comment ] >> Thank you. [ Applause ] >> John Cole: And I'm going to invite Mark Dimunation to come up to introduce Luke and have a little bit of a conversation about the first-place book in the competition. Mark. >> Mark Dimunation: Thanks. Luke, why don't you come on up. We're just going to take a moment or two to talk about our first prize winner in the extraordinary collection of an extraordinary individual that's presented to us in an essay that's called the Collection of Eugene Walter, King of the Monkeys. Luke Kelly is from Harvard University. The inspiration behind this collection as we're told in the essay was walking down the streets of Mobile, Alabama. This is a Minnesota boy it is Mobile right. >> Luke Kelly: Mobile. >> Mark Dimunation: Mobile, see there you go. Alabama in 2015 where he passed a sign that reads down in Mobile they're all crazy with Eugene Walter as the author of this phrase. It prompts young Mr. Kelly to begin to investigate who exactly this Eugene Walter is and I have to say it's a rather crazy ride from that point on. This is a very spirited essay in a very spirited collection in part because the untidy pilgrim that we read about seems to be one of those zeligs that pops up in moments in history and then disappears and suddenly, is in the movie 8 1/2 and then suddenly is in Hollywood and suddenly is writing southern cookbooks, suddenly is in New Orleans, suddenly is with Peggy Guggenheim. It's an amazing story with an amazing variety of materials that document this person's life. So, I'm going to put Luke on the spot first to congratulate you. >> Luke Kelly: Thank you. >> Mark Dimunation: And then to have you come to the mic and I want to just -- come on over. I just want to have an impression from you of what it's like to sort of watch this person's life unravel in front of you and what you've gained from that experience while collecting. >> Luke Kelly: So, first of all, thank you so much for being here and thank you so much for the prize, it really is wonderful. Eugene is not somebody that I even knew about growing up next-door to Mobile, Alabama in Pascagoula, Mississippi, I lived my whole life there and I never heard about him. But as I read his Untidy Pilgrim it's kind of autobiographical in some ways and collecting his books, going through his poetry and discovering more about him and reading about people who knew him and his life there's many layers to it. And one thing that's constant through all of them is he liked to have a good time and have a party wherever he was. And so, that's how he was mainly known by people like Andy Warhol lived down the hall from him and he called him Baby Andrew wand they staged like the first happening at NOMA. And one of the things I discovered about him along the way is that sometimes he liked to include jokes and little hidden messages throughout his work so he wrote under a pseudonym called Sebastian Willoughby and so that was a challenge in itself because no one really had gone through and done a collection or looked and tried to find every work where that was included. And so, I went and I tried to find every book that was illustrated by some random person named Sebastian Willoughby and I would buy the book and it would come in the mail and it would be him or it wouldn't be. And so, I came across some really great finds of his along the way. And it's still growing, I'm still discovering different things, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and I really wish I could have met him in person. >> Mark Dimunation: He seems like a great mystery and a great deal of fun and I love the Andy Warhol story I have to confess. What do you think is the most unusual object you have in this collection or perhaps one that was hardest to come by? >> Luke Kelly: So, the hardest to come by I didn't quite know that I was going to come by it. Like I said about the Sebastian Willoughby there was this book of these German, it's really arcane and I don't have -- I confess I don't have a clue as to how the history of these poems came to be. But there's this translation of them and Eugene did the illustrations for them under the name Sebastian Willoughby. So, I ordered the book online, it came in and next to one of the characters on the cover of it to his foot is a little EW, it's like I have it and then I opened it up and it's signed from Eugene Walter, but he doesn't sign it Eugene Walter he signs it Sebastian Willoughby. And it's to his roommate when he lived in Rome, he lived right above Cleopatra where her kitchen would have been and his name was William Weaver and he translated Thomas Wolfe's poetry into prose, no he did excuse me, the Rose, I'm blanking the title. >> Mark Dimunation: The Tennessee Williams, The Rose of Tennessee. >> Luke Kelly: [Inaudible] Echoes. >> Mark Dimunation: Echoes [inaudible] the Rose. >> Luke Kelly: And so, it was just a great, I didn't buy it because of the inscription, I actually had no idea that it was there, but when it came in it was just a terrific discovering and it's probably my favorite item in the collection I think. >> Mark Dimunation: And so, we'll close just if you could to the audience because I really do have to confess it was a cold read at the title and I thought oh we're going to be reading about some chronicler of apes and chimpanzees and I'm sure it's a very good collection. Could you tell us what the king of the monkeys actually means? >> Luke Kelly: So, Eugene his favorite animal was the monkey. When he went to the natural history museum in York he encountered this monkey that looked like he was wearing a tuxedo and he just thought it was the funniest thing. And so, he would go all the way and say -- all the time and when he was in Paris and say, oh darling you're the queen of the monkeys. And so, he was kind of their king and kind of just shepherded them around and enjoyed life. And so, it kind of embodies his philosophy of life. Monkeys do what they want, they're very kind of boastful and arrogant, but like to have a good time and that's the way he thought, he was larger-than-life in many ways and it was just a joy to be around for everyone that knew him. >> Mark Dimunation: Right. Well thank you for a great read. Congratulations, John is going to give your certificate. Let's give him a round of applause. [ Applause ] >> Luke Kelly: Mr. Goodman please. >> John Cole: We're going to move to the right spot [inaudible]. Let's get everybody in front. I'm going to be, well I'll just be [inaudible]. Let's try -- just one more I'm going to hide my papers and I'm going to [inaudible]. Thank you all. [ Applause ] Well thank you all for joining us, it's been a wonderful evening full of surprises and I think we have accomplished our purpose of hearing the stories that come out of books, the joys of book collecting and I invite you to keep your eye on this contest, on the program and to join us next year. I'd like to conclude by once again thanking the people who've made it possible and mentioning the Kislak Foundation, which I forgot to mention earlier. Thank you and thank all of you, please join us next-door for a reception in honor of our speaker and all of our winners. It was a wonderful evening for book collecting, thank you all for your contributions. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress, visit us at LOC.gov.