Book Collection Contest Is a Title Fight

Student book collections tend to feature such titles as “College Math for Management, Life and Social Sciences” or “Macroeconomics.”

Ten Scripps College seniors have taken a more individualistic approach.

The students, vying for the annual Slocum Award for Student Libraries, have amassed collections with themes as specialized as “The Soul Story of New Mexico” and “Moving Through Time: Reflections on Traditions and Innovations in Dance.”

Sharon Snyder’s collection, which she calls “Writers I Have Known and Loved,” is devoted strictly to volumes by authors Snyder has met.

The student book collections, each composed of about 25 volumes, are now on display at the college’s Denison Library and will be exhibited through Sunday.

On Saturday, two students will be named to share the $300 prize. A panel of judges, including two professors and an antiquarian bookseller, will assess each collection for breadth, potential for growth and demonstration of the collector’s “enthusiasm and satisfaction of ownership.”

Judy Harvey Sahak, Denison librarian, said the award was established by Myles Standish Slocum, a San Marino book collector descended from the Myles Standish of Pilgrim fame. Slocum, the father of two Scripps students, instituted the award in 1935 to honor the senior, or seniors, who gathered the best collection of books during a four-year stay at the women’s college, Sahak said.

“Dad started having so much fun he wanted to inspire others to make a point of collecting,” said one of Slocum’s daughters, Florence Slocum Wilson of Pasadena. After their father’s death, Wilson and her sister endowed the fund that pays the awards.

In the past, Slocum Award contenders have entered collections including an array of cookbooks with an emphasis on chocolate cake; Canadian works focusing on Nova Scotia, and a selection of previously banned books.

This year’s crop is no less idiosyncratic. For her “Books on My Hispanic Culture” collection, sociology major Diana Diaz combined volumes demonstrating connections between North American and Hispanic cultures.

In an essay accompanying her entry, she wrote that she learned American ways at school and traditional Mexican ways at home. “I always took for granted that these two worlds were not meant to be together,” she said.

Titles in her bilingual collection include “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros and “La Muerte de Artemio Cruz” by Carlos Fuentes.

Beth Saiki’s “The Soul Story of New Mexico” stems from her upbringing, too. Saiki, who grew up in New Mexico, where her father worked on a Navajo Indian reservation, wrote that the books in her collection “awakened me to the realities of the New Mexican Indians, a realization not present when I was a child.”

Zarmineh Rab also drew on her heritage in amassing her collection, “Islamic Traditions and Politics in the Middle East.” Rab, a political science major, said her love of books was inspired by her grandfather, Khawaja Nazimuddin, the prime minister of Pakistan from 1951 to 1953, who collected a vast library in the family palace.

Snyder, an English major, took the active approach in collecting volumes for her entry, “Writers I Have Known and Loved.” Once, she said, she pulled strings to get herself invited to a dinner honoring British novelist Margaret Drabble, whose “Jerusalem the Golden” is part of the collection. Another time, she chauffeured feminist author Betty Friedan to and from a lecture at Scripps. She also drove science fiction writer Octavia Butler, whose autographed copy of “Imago” is on display.

For some, the influence of the Slocum Award has extended beyond their college days.

Jeannette Larson, a second-place winner in 1987 for her collection of children’s books, said the award may have helped her get her job as assistant editor of children’s books at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in San Diego.

Sally Swan, coordinator of a used-book store run by the Friends of the South Pasadena Public Library, won the award in 1952 for her collection of children’s books. Now her collection has grown to between 500 and 700 books--financed in the earliest stages by the Slocum Award, then $50.