Sweet Briar College students Leslie Lewis and Sarah Ansani were recognized Friday, April 11 as winners of the College’s annual Nicole Basbanes Student Book Collecting Contest.

The ceremony was held in the Browsing Room of the Mary Helen Cochran Library at Sweet Briar.

Lewis, a junior from Goldsboro, N.C., won first place for her collection of food writing books. The smorgasbord includes dozens of titles, everything from M.F.K. Fisher’s “How to Cook a Wolf” to “American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes.”

In an essay submitted to the judges, Lewis wrote that her collection was born of a realization that food writing is about more than cookbooks and helpful hints for the domestic engineer.

Leslie Lewis“With increased exposure I began to understand that the realm of gastronomical literature and food writing extends well beyond cookbooks, reviews, and domestic manuals into such literary areas as personal memoir, travel writing, investigative journalism, and narrative fiction,” she wrote.

“The more I read, the more I began to grasp that food writing also varied greatly on the contextual level as well. Although always centered on the pleasures of the table, the genre frequently deals with such complex issues as emotional expression, sexual discovery, and cultural integration through the exploration of taste, hunger, and the process of culinary creation.

“I suddenly realized that in conjunction with the complex issues aroused within the text, the genre is also forced to address an enormous external hurdle as well — the initial perception of people like myself, individuals with the false notion of food writing as simply annotated recipes and domestic how-to tips.”

Sarah AnsaniAnsani, a senior from Arnold, Pa., placed second. Her submission, “Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way,” borrowed its title from a book of poetry by Charles Bukowski, one of her favorite authors.

The collection includes 50 titles, everything from books of poetry by Langston Hughes and E. E. Cummings to “Beowulf” and “Wilderness: the Lost Writings of Jim Morrison.”

Ansani’s collection grew out of a lifelong passion for reading, and later writing. In her essay, the poet and fiction writer confessed to being a “non-fiction junkie” as a child, spending more time in “The Science Library” than typical childhood books.

She read voraciously and had “various leaning towers of books,” prompting her mother to remark, “Darling, your books keep falling over in the middle of the night and scaring your father. What are you going to do with all those books?”

Winners received a cash prize of up to $300. For placing first in the Sweet Briar contest, Lewis will be entered in the Fine Books & Collections Magazine Collegiate Book-Collecting Championship, a national competition with a $2,500 first prize.

The Nicole Basbanes Student Book Collecting Contest is sponsored by Sweet Briar College Friends of the Library and Nicholas Basbanes, author of “A Splendor of Letters” and “A Gentle Madness,” among others.

Basbanes’ daughter, the competition’s namesake, graduated from Sweet Briar in 2004.

Judges consisted of the elder Basbanes, library professors John Jaffe and Lisa Johnston, professor emeritus of English Lee Piepho and Erin Rogers ’08, a past winner. In addition to the essay, contestants also submitted a bibliography with annotations.

According to Cochran Library’s Web site, “Winners do not need to have large or expensive collections. Judges will focus on the collector’s stated purpose and goals and how well the collection meets them.”

According to SBC librarian Joe Malloy, it’s “breadth of collection” that matters. “What the judges look for is the love of book collecting, not because they’re class books [or] text books, but because they’re subjects they’re interested in,” he said.

— By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer