James David Forbes collecting prize
Enter the James David Forbes collecting prize to be in with a chance of winning £500.
We want to encourage University of St Andrews students to build your own collection of printed, manuscript, or photographic material, so each year University Collections runs a competition to award £500 to the student with the best collection.
The prize is offered in honour of James David Forbes (1809-1868), the eminent scientist and Principal of the United College of St Salvator and St Leonard at St Andrews, whose library was presented to the University in 1929.
If you are a current student at St Andrews, we invite you to enter the competition and tell us about your collection.
Applications for next year's competition can be submitted from 1 January 2025.
The deadline for this year has now passed and the competition is closed.
For enquiries about the Prize, please contact Briony Harding bla1@st-andrews.ac.uk
Entry guidelines
The collection must be owned by you, put together by you, and at its core have physical material with writing on it. For example, it may consist of books, magazines, postcards, sheet music, record sleeves, knitting patterns, printed ephemera (advertisements, programmes, menus, etc.), manuscripts, photographic material, or any combination of these, brought together under a common theme. Audiovisual material may be part of the collection, but it must support the core collection, and not form the basis of it. The age, number of items, or monetary value are not important - we want to know what excites you about the items you have collected.
To tell us more about your collection, submit an essay (of no more than 2,500 words), along with an annotated bibliography of your items.
In your essay you should:
- Tell us why and how it was assembled.
- Explain what makes your collection interesting.
- Give a list of five items which you would like to add to your collection, explaining how they would improve it.
Your annotated bibliography could include comments upon:
- Condition
- Provenance
- Variant edition (where relevant)
- Illustration
To submit your entry, complete this online form.
- Remember to include your essay and bibliography as attachments along with the form itself. You may also include some photographs as attachments, but this is optional.
Full rules are given in the document below:
- JD Forbes prize rules (PDF)
Short-listed entrants will be invited to give a brief presentation of their collection to a panel of judges. The final award will be based on the interest, originality, thoughtfulness, and creativity of the collection, and the persistence of the collector.
The prize
- £500 to spend on building your collection
- £250 to spend on an item for University Collections
- Entry to the Antiquarian Booksellers Association's National Book Collecting Prize
If you are looking for inspiration, read about the collections of our former winners.
2023: James Erickson, ‘A collection of Tennysonian Arthuriana’
2022: Lakshmi Thiagarajan, ‘A glimpse into the history and practise of South Indian classical dance’
2021: Paul Thompson, ‘From Salt to Satan: An introduction to a collection of “lesbian pulp” as cultural items’
2019: Antares Wells, ‘A Century of Photographs, Found in Australia’
2018: Parker Gordon, ‘Staging and Stories: Twentieth-Century British Pageants’
2017: Arthur der Weduwen, ‘The daily literature of the Dutch Golden Age’
2016: Jenny Elwin, ‘Halcyon Days: Children's Literature c. 1880 – 1945’
2015: Dawn Hollis, ‘High and Distant Places: a travel, exploration, and mountaineering collection’