Jordan Ross

Ross has been collecting for ten years, and his decade-long effort to build a "Black Collegiate Textbooks and Histories" collection is paying off. Ross provides not only a snapshot of African American history textbooks in use during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, but also the increasingly scarce histories of the HBCUs that taught with those same textbooks. It started in Fall 2014 with a visit to the campus bookstore at Morehouse College, where he had just started his first year. He asked staff for a history of the college, only to learn that the most recent one was some fifty years out of print. He walked up the street to Spelman College, asked for the same thing, and learned that its history, too, was out of print. Now numbering more than 200 books, Ross' distinctive engagement with a print culture specific to HBCUs aims to preserve these vanishing histories. While many of the judges' decisions are hard, this one was easy. One judge's comment summarizes it well: "Man, Jordan just really ran away with it!"

Patrick Olson, Olson Rare Books

Patrick Olson first joined the rare book trade in Chicago in 2003, while still in college. He later earned his MSLIS from the University of Illinois, then spent a decade holding a variety of positions working with rare books: as a rare book cataloger at the University of Illinois and MIT, as a curator at the University of Iowa, and then as a curator and eventually Head of Special Collections at Michigan State University. Patrick returned to the trade under his own name in 2018. He moonlights as background administrative support for the David Ruggles Prize.