Nat McGartland Awarded 2025 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize Honorable Mention

 

Nat McGartland, PhD candidate in the Department of English, received honorable mention for the prestigious Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize for her collection, “Quhare scant wes Scottis: A Political History of the Scots Language.” McGartland collects books that document Scots as a language of its own, a distinct historical and political mode of expression, rather than simply a regional dialect of English.

 

In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged 30 years and younger. Their goal is to expand the popular perception of who book collectors are (and can be) by highlighting original collections built by young women, often without the knowledge or help of the rare book trade. By celebrating their achievements, they hope to inspire potential collectors to look at their shelves differently, to identify patterns and projects, to think creatively about the aspects of the historical record collectors might recognize and preserve.

McGartland’s collection includes dictionaries, glossaries, and appendices in Scots, as well as landmark publications like the 1790 first printed edition of The Brus, the oldest work in Scots, and Gawin Douglas’s Scots translation of the Aeneid, which predates the first English translation. The renewal of interest in an independent Scotland, reflected in the highly contested 2014 referendum on the question, inspired McGartland to redirect her collecting focus: “I’ve found myself moving from the historical to the contemporary. I’m interested in Scottish women poets, fiction writers, speakers of the language in the present day . . . [and] the revival of Scots in literature particularly since the 1980s.”

McGartland uses her historical collection of Scots classics to inform and contextualize her emerging collection of Scots writing in the present: a pivot that strengthens both collections.

 

Learn more about McGartland's work and other winners here.