Previous owners of some of the more important collections we've acquired over the last few years:

• Miriam S. Balmuth is Research Professor in the Department of Classics at Tufts University. She's particularly noted for her work in the archaeology and early economic history of Sardinia.
• Peter Berger is University Professor of Sociology and Theology at Boston University and the author of many influential works in sociology and the sociology of religion.
• Herbert Bloch is Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, Emeritas, at Harvard University. He has been President of the American Philological Association and President of Fellows of the Medieval Academy and is the author of the three-volume Monte Cassino in the Middle Ages. His books included many from the collections of Felix Jacoby and Arthur D. Nock.
• Ernst A. Ebbinghaus was a professor at Pennsylvania State University and worked extensively on the Gothic language. Students of German will recognize him most readily as editor since 1962 of Braune's Althochdeutsches Lesebuch.
• James O. Freedman was president of Dartmouth College and, before that, of the University of Iowa. Many of the books in his collection were personally inscribed to him by their authors.
• Irving Kaplan worked on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University and was a founding member of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT. He was perhaps most widely known at MIT for his development of programs in the history of science and classical Greek, and his library was particularly strong in the history of science.
• Gyorgy Kepes worked with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Berlin, in 1937 became head of the Light and Color Department of Chicago's Institute of Design (the "New Bauhaus"), and in 1946 joined the faculty of MIT, where he later founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. A pioneer in the convergence of the arts and technology, he was the author of Language and Vision and The New Landscape and editor of the important "Vision and Value" series.
• Simon Kuznets was a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University and was a member of the staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was the 1971 Nobel Laureate in Economics.
• Lloyd G. Patterson was Huntington Preofessor of Historical Theology at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His particular interest was in patristics.
• Jerome B. Wiesner worked during World War II in MIT's Radiation Laboratory and afterwards in the Research Laboratory of Electronics, of which he became Director. An active opponent of nuclear proliferation, he was chair of the President's Science Advisory Committee under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and was later Provost and then President of MIT. After retirement, he was a founder of MIT's Media Laboratory.