In 2022, the prize was awarded to two winners:
Peter Kornicki, 'Why typography was abandoned in 17th-century Japan’
In this essay, using new evidence, I shall show why the tradition of typography, taken up in the 1590s after being introduced simultaneously from Korea and Europe, was abandoned in the 1620s in favour of woodblock printing, which had already been used for centuries and was to dominate printing up to the 1870s.
Paul Lennon, 'Caveat emptor: the curious case of Scotland’s Astorga Collection'
The Astorga Collection comprises 3,716 pre-1800 volumes and forms part of the Special and Named Printed Collections at the National Library of Scotland. In this study, I revisit the nineteenth-century historical narrative surrounding the events that saw part of the Astorga library taken from Spain to France, the result of political pressures, and sold in England to raise funds. The buyer, Thomas Thorpe (1791-1851), a London bookseller who soon thereafter fell bankrupt, sold a number of Astorga volumes to the Faculty of Advocates, Edinburgh. In particular, I focus my attention upon the purchase to understand how the Faculty paid the princely sum of £3,000 for what it believed was some seven thousand volumes only to receive less than half this amount. Extensive use is made of hitherto unexplored archival sources to illuminate the involvement of Fernando VII in relaxing mayorazgo to help the Marquis clear his debts, the effect of the Decreto del 6 de agosto de 1811 on the Marquis’ income, the involvement of the Scottish publisher Archibald Constable (1774-1827) in the Faculty’s purchase, and how a misunderstanding in the Scottish chapter of this collection’s history may have resulted in the costly mistake.