Book, Print Collectors Win Prize

William G. Bikales, a graduate student in economics, has been interested in Chinese literature for a long time, and in collecting books for even longer. About 15 years ago, the owners of a bookstore got him started on a collection of translations of Chinese poetry, including those of Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley.

Rare Move

Since then he has accumulated 500 books, all first edition, all translations of Chinese poetry.

For his efforts Bikales shared a $2000 prize for book or print collecting with an undergraduate, Adam M. Weiss '89 for his print collection. The award was announced last month at a dinner at the Faculty Club.

When Bikales won the prize, he was delighted, he said. "Even if I hadn't won I would have been really happy about the whole experience," he said.

Weiss, who collects contemporary prints, mostly from Austria, said of his assemblage, "I've always really loved art and two years ago I worked in a gallery in Austria over the summer."

As the editor of the Harvard Art Journal, Weiss met people who had different art collections, which really helped his own collection, he said.

He said that the purpose of the prize was to foster interest in collecting, and to have people realize that collecting does not have to be an expensive hobby.

"I think that people's view of collecting is that it is necessarily expensive. I would hope that this would encourage people to get involved with it," he said.

The two students were given the Philip Hofer Prize in Collecting, a new award created in honor of the late Philip Hofer '21, founder and first curator of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts in the Houghton Library and secretary of the Fogg Art Museum.

The $2000 award is given every three years to a graduate or undergraduate whose collection of art or books best exemplifies the traditions of breadth, coherence and imagination exemplified by Hofer, who formed and gave to the College a collection wide in scope, original in conception and scholarly in purpose, according to a press release.

Melvin R. Seiden '52, a member of the Visiting Committee for the Fogg, and a collector himself, established and funded the prize in Hofer's memory.

In a rare move, this year the judges for the contest decided to split the prize, rather than select an outright winner. In addition, the judges chose two collections for honorable mention, Michael H. Choi '91 and Robert J. O'Hara, a graduate student. A total of nine students applied for the award.

Wolfgang M. Freitag, one of the judges and Fine Arts librarian, said that the judges considered the scope of the collection, the consistency with which they had been compiled, the kind of collection that Hofer liked, as well as the format and style in which the collecting purpose was presented.

Freitag said he and the other two judges, Eleanor M. Garvey, the Philip Hofer curator of printing and graphic arts, and John M. Rosenfield, the Rockefeller Professor of Oriental Art and a curator of the Fogg Art Museum, chose two winners and two honorable mentions because the entries were so good.

"In general, the entries were of such a high quality that it was difficult to decide," Freitag said. "You have such a great variety of collecting that it's very hard to do justice."

Choi, a collector of ocean liner memorabilia, said that he was really pleased to have won an honorable mention, but that he thinks he did not win the prize because his collection was too unique.