Dutch scholar and author Ina Kok will receive the 2018 award, and an endowment of $10,000, for her four-volume work: Woodcuts in Incunabula Printed in the Low Countries (2013). The awards ceremony for arguably the most prestigious prize in the antiquarian book world will be held during the ABA Rare Book Fair London at the Battersea Evolution on May 25.
Kok, who has held positions at the Royal Library in The Hague and the University of Amsterdam, has spent decades compiling a complete census of the illustrations used in books printed in the 15th century in the Netherlands. Over 3800 illustrations and their different states are recorded - allowing for an accurate dating system for incunabula.
The BH Breslauer Foundation was set up by the Berlin-New York rare book dealer Dr Bernard Breslauer (1918-2004).
The jury meets every four years to consider publications relating to bibliography in its broadest sense from textual bibliography to history of the book, bookbinding, papermaking, type-founding, library catalogues plus short-title catalogues of a single author or typographer.
The jury members in 2018 were Bettina Wagner (Bavarian State Library, Munich), Daniel de Simone (previously of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC), Yann Sordet (Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris), Fabrizio Govi (Italy), Winfried Kuhn (Germany) and Justin Croft (United Kingdom).
Over 50 publications from publishers and academic institutions across the globe were submitted and reviewed for the most recent award. Honourable mentions were given to two further publications: Dirk Imhof’s Jan Moretus and the Continuation of the Plantin Press, (2014) and Staffan Fogelmark’s The Kallierges Pindar: A Study in Renaissance Greek Scholarship and Printing (2015).
