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Even though book collecting flourished in the seventeenth century, many private libraries were small and rather ordinary; thus, a li­ brary of thirty-five hundred volumes was considered special. John Locke had accumulated a library of thirty-four hundred works; Samuel Pepys’s numbered about the same size. The celebrated English diarist, John Evelyn, owned a collection of five thousand books—an outstand­ ing achievement for this period. From his home in the remote region of southeastern France, iso­ lated from the intellectual and publishing centers of Europe, NicholasClaude de Fabri, Seigneur de Peiresc, naturalist, philologist, numis­ matist, scientist, antiquarian, and dilettante par excellence, could count slightly less than six thousand tomes on his shelves. The size of a library, however, did not necessarily determine its importance. The Peiresc library was special because of the role this Maecenas of the Midi played in the seventeenth-century world of books. Peiresc acted as a catalyst in the book-publishing trade through his corre­ spondence with authors, editors, and printers by encouraging, cajol­ ing, and occasionally offering financial support in order to bring their ideas and works into print. One scholar described Peiresc’s library as a kind of current national bibliography of books published in western Europe during the first four decades of the seventeenth century. The University of Iowa Library is fortunate that its holdings include not only printed materials about the life of this interesting Frenchman but also copies of many books listed in the Peiresc library. Except for his letters, the best primary source about Peiresc’s life remains the information supplied by the famous skeptic and Epicur­ ean philosopher, Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655). His first extensive con­ tact with this French amateur occurred while he held the chair of

A Seventeenth-Century Book Collector: Seigneur De Peiresc