Congratulations to the 2025 Schiller Prize Winner, Dr. Elizabeth Hoiem
The Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) is thrilled to announce the winners for the 2025 Justin G. Schiller Prize for the best bibliographic study of pre-1951 children’s literature. The prize committee, consisting of scholars and curators working the field of historical children’s literature selected the following works from a robust pool of applicants:
The winner of the 2025 Justin G. Schiller Prize is Elizabeth Massa Hoiem’s The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children’s Literature, 1762-1860 (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024).
Hoiem’s study provides an excellent in-depth analysis of the technology texts written for children and youth in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Using children’s print culture in the form of books, object lesson kits, and pedagogical ephemera like wall posters, Hoiem deftly charts the development of mechanical learning texts across classes from child factory workers in Lancasterian monitorial schools to wealthy children engaging in experiments using material found in their well-appointed mansions. Hoiem puts texts by British middle class didactic writers like Maria Edgeworth and Isaac Taylor in conversation with working class advocates including George Mudie and William Hill. The Education of Things breaks new ground in our understanding of the relationships between academic scientific theory, practical technological knowledge, class, and gender in the rising British Empire. Its publication comes at a time of heated debate over the appropriate role of technological education in current school curriculums.
Honorable Mention: Dr. Eric Lamore, scholarly edition of Abigail Field Mott’s The Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano
The 2025 Justin G. Schiller Honorable Mention goes to Eric Lamore’s scholarly edition of Abigail Field Mott’s The Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano (Morgantown, W.V.: West Virginia University Press, 2023). The Schiller Prize Committee commends Lamore on his detailed bibliographic study of Quaker writer Abigail Field Mott’s1829 adaptation of Equiano’s autobiography for the students at the New York African Free School. Mott’s text is printed in facsimile with extensive notes by Lamore about the book’s typography, composition, historical context, and the ways Mott adapted and changed Equiano’s original text for the use of African American school children. This edited text is accompanied by a series of appendices, including a pathbreaking essay by Lamore placing Mott’s adapted text within the context of early Black Atlantic Studies.
The Schiller Prize jury is extremely pleased by the number of high-quality submissions received this cycle, reflecting ongoing interest in the use of historical children’s literature as the focus of bibliographic study.