Student Book Collecting Contest winner is named, collection on display at Thomas Cooper Library through May 30

"Mummies and Egyptology Before Tutankhamen," a book collection created by graduate student John Higgins, has won the Thomas Cooper Library Student Book Collecting Contest for 2008.

Higgins' collection is on display in the Thomas Cooper Library West Gallery through May 30. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

The annual Thomas Cooper Library Student Book Collecting Contest encourages and supports students' interest in forming book collections related to their academic or extracurricular interests.

The award was initiated by the Thomas Cooper Society in 1993 with sponsorship from the Columbia-based publishing house of Bruccoli-Clark-Layman. Today the award, carrying a first prize of $250, is supported by the University Libraries.

Winners have the opportunity to display their collection in one of the library's exhibition galleries, and the winning entry will be submitted to the National Student Book Collecting Contest, sponsored by Fine Books and Collections Magazine and the Grolier Club of New York, where USC's 2007 winning collection received an honorable mention.

In his introduction to the collection, Higgins writes:

"At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in both England and America, a popular 'science' was the public spectacle of mummies being unwrapped before an upper-class audience in top hats and evening wear. Mummies became so familiar in nineteenth-century culture that stage farces and comic stories commonly borrowed on the stock trope of reanimated, bandaged corpses.

"In the late nineteenth century, both fiction and non-fiction works seized upon Egyptian ideas of reincarnation and immortality. Egyptian spirituality was adopted by popular religion and magical science in the mode of H. P. Blavatsky's Theosophy. Eventually, the reanimated mummy, most often female, became a staple in supernatural adventure literature. Vengeful or sexually-dangerous living mummies appeared in late nineteenth-century adventure fiction, reflecting uneasiness about sexuality and gender roles in the works of their male authors.

"Conversely, the powerful role of women in Egyptian history inspired such early female scholars as the great Egyptologist Amelia B. Edwards.

Comparisons abounded between the dynasties of Cleopatra and Hatshetsup (Hatasu) and the reigns of Queens Elizabeth and Victoria. Finally, emerging from the late-Victorian Gothic revival, pulp mysteries and horror tales abounded into the twentieth century, still most often featuring female reanimated mummies, the gender shift to male occurring after 1922, when Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered.

"This collection, assembled during research for a scholarly work on mummies in literature and popular culture, 'quickly took on a life of its own.' To truly sample a cross-section of a literary and cultural phenomenon, the collection and exhibit include histories, scientific treatises, satires, comedies, mysteries, pulp adventure, supernatural fiction, popular religion, and the visual arts."

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