“From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning”

This checklist of Thomas Hollis’s gifts to Harvard College Library documents the generosity and the motives of one of the earliest and one of the greatest donors to Harvard University. Promoting civil and religious liberty, Hollis distributed books in his distinctive binding across Britain, Europe, and the American colonies. Hollis’s aims for Harvard College have received careful attention from historians and bookmen, but the full extent of his donations has not been clear until now.Thomas Hollis and his books were the subject of William Bond’s 1982 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at Cambridge University.