Quantitative Analysis
How many books does it take to win the T. Kimball Brooker Prize for undergraduate book collecting? Depends on the collection. Co-first prize winner Rachel Anne Dion, AB'02 (who also won the Magazine's essay contest, page 34), has 57 volumes in her Ancient Egypt collection. Co-first prize winner Aniko Szatmari, AB'02, has 180 books about the development of Sufism in Iran and central Asia. Jessie B. Ferguson, AB'02, received an honorable mention for her 90-volume collection of modern central European literature in translation. And second-year division winner Zachary Martin has 18 works of first-person masculine American travel literature.

So how long does it take to compile Brooker prize-worthy books? Ferguson notes she searched for Malina for months-becoming hooked on the Ingeborg Bachmann novel after reading half a page at a Madison, Wisconsin, library-and finally got the out-of-print text from a friend in Massachusetts.

For his part, Martin refuses to quantify his search time. "I search for certain titles," he admits, "but I inevitably find things I didn't know I was looking for. In that way, the story of my collection is itself a story of travel."
-S.A.Z.

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