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National Champion Book Collector
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Jessica Camille Jordan, a PhD candidate in English, is the first Stanford student to win The National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest. To gain eligibility for the national contest, Jordan took first place in the Wreden Prize, offered every two years by Stanford Libraries and sponsored by an endowment created in memory of William P. Wreden ’34, an antiquarian bookseller who maintained a shop in downtown Palo Alto, and Byra J. Wreden, a lifetime collector of the works of children’s book illustrator Kate Greenaway.
Jessica Camille Jordan with her collection of works illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, 2021. Photo credit: Jessica Camille Jordan.
Jordan’s first-place essay for the 2021 Wreden Prize, "Six Decades of Leo and Diane Dillon," describes her collection of more than 500 works of the husband-and-wife book illustrators who were awarded two consecutive Caldecott Medals. Audrey Senior, an undergraduate majoring in English and Theater and Performance Studies, took second place for "'The Art of Making Art is Putting it Together': A Stephen Sondheim Collection." Jeffrey Rutherford, a PhD student in Energy Resources Engineering, took third place for "Chronicles of a Community in Transition: The Alberta Oil Sands."
“My interest in collecting is closely connected to Stanford Libraries,” Jordan said. “In fact, I never conceived of the books I had as a collection until I saw a flyer for the Wreden Prize in my first year here. Interest in submitting to the prize allowed me to think about the books I had in a different, more narrative way.”
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“The library staff have been friends and great supporters of both my collecting and academic interests. Their expertise was vital to research I conducted on a notebook held in Stanford's Special Collections, which has now been published by the Electronic British Library Journal.”
– Jessica Camille Jordan
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The National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest is jointly administered by the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies, the Grolier Club, and the Center for the Book and the Rare Books and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. Jordan accepted the national grand prize at a virtual awards ceremony in October. Students from New York University, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University also received recognition. Stanford’s only prior award in the national competition was achieved by Emily Brodman in the essay category in 2011.
“My first acquaintance with the art of Leo and Diane Dillon came through the beloved fantasy novels of my childhood, books like Sabriel by Garth Nix, Wise Child by Monica Furlong, and Enchantress from the Stars by Sylvia Louise Engdahl. Specifically, I was captivated by the elegant, long-fingered hands the heroines on all three covers shared – what I know now is a dead giveaway for identifying even unsigned Dillon works,” Jordan said. She is creating a comprehensive bibliography and has located their work in comics, records, posters, and a treasured Reader’s Digest Condensed Books installment containing their illustrations for Rosalind Laker’s Jewelled Path that she found among her grandmother’s books.
Leo and Diane Dillon’s cover illustrations for Her Stories by Virginia Hamilton, a children’s edition of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and The People Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton. Photo by Jessica Camille Jordan.
Jordan’s Wreden Prize submission (available online) chronicles the challenges overcome by the Dillons, who started out as artistic rivals at Parson’s School for Design in New York City in the 1950s and became an interracial couple married a full ten years before Loving vs. Virginia made marriages like theirs legal in all fifty states. “The duo developed a concept of the ‘third artist,’ a creator who was neither Leo nor Diane but emerged from them both, and channeled their experiences into their art, especially the illustrations they created for children’s books,” she said.
“My research focuses on how books' material form impacts the ways we make meaning from them,” Jordan said. She is writing a dissertation that explores the impact of the late nineteenth-century “flood” of books on the structures of literary culture and prestige inherited in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “The library staff have been friends and great supporters of both my collecting and academic interests. Their expertise was vital to research I conducted on a notebook held in Stanford's Special Collections, which has now been published by the Electronic British Library Journal. The notebook was compiled by Stanford librarian Alice N. Hays when she was sent abroad to observe library methods in 1909.”
Leo and Diane Dillon artwork for Avram Davidson’s The Phoenix and the Mirror, Joanna Russ’s And Chaos Died, and Avram Davidson’s The Island Under the Earth. Photo by Jessica Camille Jordan.
“Special Collections staff have also shown me bibliographic treasures like the first American edition of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove, essential to my research as a book historian. James himself thought it was an exceptional presentation of his prose, so I had to see it for myself,” Jordan explained. “There is nothing like talking about books with other book people!”
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Special thanks to the Wreden Prize volunteer judges: Mary Crawford, John Crichton, Chris Loker, Benjamin Albritton, Kathleen Smith, and Ben Stone. Please direct inquiries about the Wreden Prize to Rebecca Wingfield at wingfiel@stanford.edu and about sponsoring student activities at Stanford Libraries to Gabrielle Karampelas at gkaram@stanford.edu.
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