KU Libraries honors 11 finalists in Snyder Book Collecting Contest

A shelf built for two young nieces and nephews earned Jessina Emmert first place in the graduate division of the 68th annual Snyder Book Collecting Contest, a reminder that the most powerful collections often begin at home and grow into something larger for Lawrence and Douglas County.

University of Kansas Libraries honored 11 student finalists with cash prizes at a reception April 28 at Watson Library, where the contest once again turned personal libraries into public evidence of intellectual life at KU. Emmert, a sixth-year doctoral candidate in women, gender and sexuality studies, won for African American History and Children's Literature: Slavery to Civil Rights. She said she began building the collection five years ago to help her young relatives engage with difficult history in age-appropriate ways, giving the project a family purpose as well as an academic one.

The undergraduate winner, Riley Verdict of Kansas City, Kansas, took first place with a collection on Gaudiya Vaishnavism, a devotional tradition rooted in 16th-century Bengal. Verdict’s path to the topic ran from the Beatles and George Harrison to a temple visit, then to academic research and a trip to India. That kind of leap from curiosity to scholarship is exactly what the Snyder contest was created to encourage.

KU Libraries says the contest began in 1956, when then-director Robert Vosper sought to encourage students to collect books, and Elizabeth Morrison Snyder of Kansas City provided the financial support that helped the competition endure. KU’s history page traces the program’s origins to correspondence between Vosper and Snyder in late 1956. The contest now recognizes collections that can include books, digital items, graphic novels, music and film, reflecting how students build archives across formats instead of limiting their interests to a single medium.

The event also drew a keynote from Stephanie Stillo, a KU alumna who graduated in 2014 with a doctorate in modern European history and now leads the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. She joined the Library of Congress in 2016 and became chief of the division in October 2023. The division is described as North America’s largest collection of rare books, with nearly 1 million holdings, underscoring the kind of professional path that can grow out of collecting, curation and careful stewardship.

For Lawrence and Douglas County, the contest offered more than a campus ceremony. It showed how KU’s library culture helps students preserve ideas, family memory and research trails that can last well beyond graduation, adding to the region’s intellectual record one collection at a time.