Book History‘s annual Greenspan–Rose Prize is given to the best article in that year’s volume whose author was a graduate student at the time the essay was first submitted. Winners receive US$500 and recognition at SHARP’s Annual General Meeting.
Formerly the “Graduate Student Essay Prize,” the award was renamed as of the 25th anniversary volume to honor Book History founding editors Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose. Both eminent book historians in their own right, in their role as journal editors Greenspan and Rose gave extraordinary attention to mentoring young scholars and graduate students. The current editors of Book History are equally devoted to fostering the careers of new and emerging members of the profession.
The 2026 Essay Prize Winner
The editors of Book History are pleased to announce that this year’s Greenspan-Rose award, given to the graduate student who wrote the best article appearing in that year’s volume, goes to Rodrigo Lichtle Ventosa of the University of Toronto.
Rodrigo’s article, “La Cleta Cartonera: Limits and Potentialities of the Expendable in Puebla’s Publishing Market,” is a mixed-methods overview of a fascinating publishing and printing genre in Mexico: the “cartonera,” or publication printed on reused cardboard.
The editors found it an enormously cool topic, grounded in material book history but also demonstrating a deep understanding of the Mexican artistic scene. It touches on themes of waste, reuse, and resistance. It combines cultural history, archival work, descriptive bibliography, and interviews with participants. It is a great example of what book history as a discipline can do and can reveal about the relationship between a mass culture and an artistic underground. It’s also beautifully written.
Previous awardees
2024
Sun Zhang and Ryan Cordell, “Imagined Readers: Contrasting Professional and Reader Reviews of Chinese Book Design”
2023
Sarah Schaefer Walton, “Crafting a ‘Species of Literature’: John Murray’s Multidisciplinary, Polyvocal Handbooks for Travellers”
2022
Jennifer Manoukian, “Literary Translation and the Expansion of the Ottoman Armenian Reading Public, 1853–1884”
2021
Fan Wang, “How Late Imperial Chinese Literati Read Their Books: Inscribing, Collating, Excerpting”
2020
Mary Catherine Kinniburgh, “The Postwar American Poet’s Library: An Archival Consideration with Charles Olson and the Maud/Olson Library”
2019
Amy Sopcak-Joseph, “Reconstructing and Gendering the Distribution Networks of Godey’s Lady’s Book in the Nineteenth Century”
2018
Anna Wager, “Photographs, Pens, and Print: William Morris and the Technologies of Typography”
2017
Kathryn A. Schwartz, “Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?”
2016
Kristen Highland, “In the Bookstore: The Houses of Appleton and Book Cultures in Antebellum New York City” (additional material at Book History Unbound: “An Appleton Archive”)
2015
Elizabeth Della Zazzera, “Translating Revolutionary Time: French Republican Almanacs in the United States”
2014
Albert A. Palacios, “Preventing ‘Heresy’: Censorship and Privilege in Mexican Publishing, 1590–1612”
2013
Brigitte Beck Pristed, “Glasnost Noire: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Publication and Reception of James Hadley Chase”
2012
Elizabeth le Roux, “Book History in the African World: The State of the Discipline”
2011
Eva Mroczek, “Thinking Digitally About the Dead Sea Scrolls: Book History Before and Beyond the Book”
2010
Spencer D. C. Keralis, “Pictures of Charlotte: The Illustrated Charlotte Temple and Her Readers”
2009
Elizabeth Yale, “With Slips and Scraps: How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive”
2008
Joanne Filippone Overty, “The Cost of Doing Scribal Business: Prices of Manuscript Books in England, 1300-1483”
2007
Matt Miller, “Composing the First Leaves of Grass: How Whitman Used His Early Notebooks”
2006
Melissa Free, “Un-Erasing Crusoe: Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century”
Special citation for a distinguished article by an undergraduate student awarded to Emily Oswald, “Imagining Race: Illustrating the Poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar”
2005
Patricia May B. Jurilla, “Florante at Laura and the History of the Filipino Book”
2004
2003
Rebecca Rego Barry, “The Neo-Classics: (Re)Publishing the ‘Great Books’ in the United States in the 1990s”
2002
Matt Cohen, “Morton’s Maypole and the Indians: Publishing in Early New England”
2001
Eric Lupfer, “Before Nature Writing: Houghton, Mifflin and Company and the Invention of the Outdoor Book, 1880-1900”