Nearly all the Spanish and Portuguese books in the Department were collected and given to the Library by the late Philip Hofer, founding Curator of the Department. They reflect his personal taste and his awareness of the historical importance of such a collection - foreword.

Harvard's home for rare books and manuscripts opened in 1942, and thanks to the energy of a small group of librarians and the creativity and generosity of its benefactor, Arthur Houghton, it quickly emerged as a center of inquiry and memory without equal. This 1992 volume, compiled by senior Houghton librarians, blends documentary with oral history to look back on the library's origins, the growth of its collections, and the activities of the staff who made it a home for precious books and original scholarship.

The Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Museum (British Library), generally referred to as BMC, is a monument in the history of the book. BMC followed on from the rearrangement of the Museum's incunabula begun by Robert Proctor on the basis of the comprehensive survey of printing types and presses of the fifteenth century that he had published in 1898 as an 'Index' of the incunabula in the Museum and the Bodleian Library. The Index represented a working-out of the system he had developed for the identification of printers of the incunabula period on the basis of typographical material. The volumes of BMC extend Proctor's principles by providing full descriptions of the incunabula in the collections of the British Museum and making revisions where necessary. The first part appeared in 1908, prepared by A.W. Pollard after Proctor's death in 1903. The most recent part was published in 1985.

Philip Hofer, Founding Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts in Houghton Library, amassed one of the great collections of early penmanship textbooks before his death in 1984. Becker's catalogue tells the story of this collection while amply illustrating the diversity and expressive power of the arts of the pen.