Louise Bechtel Fellowship Winner Announced!

The Louise Bechtel Fellowship provides a $4,000 grant to a qualified children’s librarian to spend a month or more reading and studying at the Baldwin Library of the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville. The Baldwin Library contains a special collection of 85,000 volumes of children’s literature published mostly before 1950. The fellowship is endowed in memory of Louise Seaman Bechtel and Ruth M. Baldwin. This year’s winner is Mary Elizabeth Beardsley Land, director of the Abbeville County Library System, who will be studying “Home for the Holidays: the Depiction of Holiday Themes in Books for Children.”