The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) is pleased to announce that Susan Jaffe Tane will fund the prizes for the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest. The prize is now known as The Susan Tane Prize for Student Book Collectors. 

Established in 2005 by Fine Books & Collections Magazine, the ABAA, along with the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies (FABS), the Grolier Club, and the Center for the Book and the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress jointly assumed leadership of the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest in 2010.  The program aims to recognize outstanding book collecting efforts by college and university students, and to encourage young collectors to become accomplished bibliophiles.

Ms. Tane has been listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in American Women for over three decades and was the 2018 recipient of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.

She is a longtime bibliophile and philanthropist. Susan possesses the foremost privately held collection of Edgar Allan Poe books, manuscripts, and artifacts in the world. Appropriately, she serves on the Board of Directors of the Edgar Allan Poe Museums and Foundation in Richmond, Virginia. Susan was also the Executive Producer of the recent American Masters PBS documentary “Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive,” which aired in the fall of 2017.

In addition to Poe, Susan has also established notable collections of works by Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Susan has published catalogs of her collections and has co-curated exhibitions world-wide.

Presently, she is on the Chairman’s Council for the American Trust for the British Library, the Board of Rare Book School, and the Morgan Library & Museum Visitors Committee and Director’s Roundtable.

She established the Tane Research Library at the Walt Whitman Initiative, the Tane Whitman Scholarship, and the Edgar Allan Poe Travel Scholarship for the Poe Studies Association.