“I really dislike the bookshelves that are color-coded,” says William Bramwell ’27, with a grimace. He thinks it’s tacky.
Bramwell collects books, but he doesn’t consider himself a book collector. “It’s never been conscious, like ‘I’m a collector,’” he explained.
He might not be a collector, but he does have a collection of twenty-six books, which he’s entitled “The Wealth of Ideas: The History of Economic Thought.” That title is a play on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which he has in hardcover, the 1937 edition.
Some collectors spend vast sums hiring curators to color-code their bookshelves. To them, books are like wallpaper: decorative, and purely material. But not to Bramwell—he’s in it for the “wealth of ideas.”
Bramwell started reading about economic theory during the COVID-19 pandemic. He had never taken an economics class before, but after lockdown orders went into effect and the economy collapsed, he started to pay attention to debates over economic policy that were playing out on the news.
Bramwell, then a high school freshman, first read N. Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Microeconomics, a standard college economics textbook, cover to cover. Next, Aristotle’s Oeconomica. Then it was Locke, then Hegel, Engels, Marx, and Kahneman. Joseph Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis became a “constant bedside companion” of his.
Before Bramwell knew it, he “was tumbling down the rabbit hole of economic thought.”
Now Bramwell is a veritable expert on the history of economic theory, even though his education in the field was “self-directed.” When we met to talk about his collection in the Sterling nave, he gave me a lesson on the theory of marginal utility—very useful if unprompted.
This spring, Bramwell submitted his collection to be considered for Yale’s prestigious Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prize. Every year, one senior and one sophomore win the 1000 dollar and 700 dollar prizes, respectively.
Aside from the prize money, there’s clout associated with the prize in the rather insular world of book collecting, but Bramwell wasn’t collecting books in hopes of winning. He found out about the competition two weeks before submissions were due, years after he had started his collection. The past winners I talked to didn’t curate their collections with the objective of winning the cash either. If money and prestige aren’t driving these collectors, then what is?
The eponymous Adrian Van Sinderen, Class of 1910, endowed the prize in 1957. In his New York Times obituary, Van Sinderen is sketched as a “man of wide interests:” he was a businessman and philanthropist, and an accomplished organist. He won 2,500 horse racing ribbons across the U.S. He wrote over thirty books, twenty-five of them about Christmas. He traveled to every U.S. state and national park, and every continent but Antarctica.
Van Sinderen instructed that his prize be awarded to amateur book collectors “not on the basis of the rarity or monetary value of the books, but rather for the imagination and intelligence used by the student in forming his collection.” Recent winning collections include “Nehru, Nehruvianism, Nehrumania,” and “A Compendium of the Allusions of Lemony Snicket.” Evidently, points for whimsy.
Van Sinderen was in his heyday during the Roaring Twenties. During that period, accumulating stuff was how ordinary Americans signaled their status and education level. Consumerism and materialism were booming. It became stylish to own and display books. You didn’t have to read them—just wear them like shoes or a bag, or match them to the upholstery in your sitting room.
Van Sinderen himself was wealthy, make no mistake. He had the money to romp across six continents in his lifetime, which was not easy to do before the airplane.
Perhaps this curious clause in his endowment of the prize about rewarding “imagination and intelligence” over monetary value is a clue to why he established the prize, and why he wanted it to be his legacy here. He funded this prize, instead of paying for a Van Sinderen Tower or a Van Sinderen Hall.
Van Sinderen may have observed that something was disappearing from how America consumed books—that very “imagination and intelligence,” perhaps. And he must have wanted to preserve it, celebrate it, and teach it.
Book collecting might not seem like a practical pastime for college students, who often lack disposable income and bookshelf real estate. Professional book collectors spend inordinate amounts of time and money competing at auction for first editions and signed copies of texts, after them for their “rarity and monetary value.”
Even so, for almost seventy years, the Van Sinderen Prize has attracted bookish undergraduates interested in collecting. They do it for the sake of the intellectual pursuit and find themselves falling down rabbit holes like Bramwell did. It’s rather curious.
For judge Seth Bellamy ’25, “book collecting is not this seamless act of finding an author and buying all their books.” Enrique Vazquez ’23, who won the prize his senior year, agrees that “part of the fun is the hunt”; he’s found some of his favorite books at sales in church basements or antique stores in rural Minnesota. Professional book collectors have bibliographies, like shopping lists for auctions they attend.
Judges evaluate a collection not on the number of books on the list or their value, but on how cohesive the collection is. If the aim of a collection is to answer a question put forth by the collector, then judges evaluate how well the question is answered. As Bellamy explained, collecting is “cultivat[ing] a way of knowing.”
The question that ties Bramwell’s collection together is: How does our economic system function, and why does it function that way?
Harvard, Princeton, and other universities have their own versions of the Van Sinderen Prize, and there’s an annual national book collecting prize awarded by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. Enrique Vazquez ’23 won third place in the national competition in 2023.
The question Vazquez asked in his collection “Tales of the Midwestern Northwoods” was: How do I bring a little bit of home with me to Yale?
After moving to New Haven from Minnesota, Vazquez felt like he was “in two separate worlds.” He started collecting books “out of a desire to stay connected to the Midwest.”
The first book Vazquez bought for his collection was environmentalist Sigurd Olson’s Listening Point, set in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota, where Vazquez also loves to adventure. “It is tradition to sit at Olson’s point and reflect on one’s travels” in the BWCA, Vazquez writes in the introduction to his collection.
Vazquez started to hunt for more books by outdoorsmen, indigenous peoples, trailblazing women, artists, loggers, and families like his who had captured the beauty of that “listening point.” He wanted to be able to transport himself there when he was in New Haven, far from the northwoods and his family.
Van Sinderen, who traveled to six continents, all fifty states, and every national park in the United States, wrote that “the search for books leads one into strange, interesting, and always delightful worlds.” Van Sinderen found those worlds—real and imagined—while searching for books and in his books themselves. For him, of course it would be ridiculous to evaluate a collection on the material value of the books assembled: the value of books as worlds themselves transcends the value of the paper, ink, and glue they’re made of.
And yet, there is a magic to that paper, ink, and glue that enchanted Bramwell, Vazquez, and Van Sinderen alike. Bramwell said that he only buys a book when he sees it and thinks: “This is the kind of book I would want to have when I am 70 years old.” Otherwise he’d borrow.
Graham Arader ’72, who is 72 years old, won the prize twice and is now one of the foremost rare book and map dealers in the United States. He still has every book from the collections he submitted for the prize when he was a student, not to mention thirty thousand other books in his reference library on American history and cartography.
Arader has made a living on books and maps, yet he admits “95 percent of the reason for the existence of libraries was ended twenty years ago by Google.”
For Arader, the aim of the library—and the aim of book collecting—is the preservation of “material culture,” and for the university, “exciting students by showing them the original work of art in the classroom.”
Vazquez is always thrilled to find marginalia in books he digs up at antique stores. Of the previous owners of the books in his collection, Vazquez said, “they wrote notes on the trip they were planning or they wrote their packing list” in the front cover, or went back after a trip and wrote about the trails they’d trekked on. That’s that “material culture.” It can’t be replicated.
For Vazquez, “books are lived.” Rebecca Romney, a professional book collector who delivered the annual Van Sinderen Prize Lecture this February, said in her presentation: “Book collecting is storytelling, and it’s not just the story of our books but the stories of ourselves.”
-Adele Haeg is a first-year in Timothy Dwight College.
Illustrations by Sarah Feng.