Among other things, second place winner, Lillie Wade writes of the odor of books. "They smelled as if they'd been smoked," she writes,

like ham and bacon . . . in the wisdom . . . of so many eyes . . .The smell of old books was aromatherapy. . . . I loved reading the oldest books, the ones that had passed through three or four owners before finding their way to the library. . . . I poured over the underlined passages, their notes in the margins. . . . I touched the rich, yellowed paper of the pages . . . and inhaled their scent. . . . Libraries are museums, time capsules . . . They are our intellectual granaries, where [the] precious knowledge of ages past must be saved and guarded.

Randa Adechoubou, the third place winner, was born in Benin. "Poverty," Randa explains,

is something really present in my country. My father was the only breadwinner and his low salary was just enough to nourish my family . . . I . . . remember I asked my father to buy books for me but he couldn't . . . Libraries . . . helped me to forget the problems of money, which were a daily routine in my home. Libraries transformed my life . . . Libraries gave me the desire to read . . . and permitted me, as a young child, to discover a wide world from my country.

Finally, Priyanka A. Champaneri, our Honorable Mention, writes: