Individual Items of Special Interest in the Forbes Collection

Forbes' library is a fascinating collection, for, in a way, we can still visit his study as he left it, though in the intervening centuries its contents have been visited by fire and flood» My interest here has been to cull the sixteenth-century material and to present some of the interesting items; the choice was personal, \n.th an eye for those items which might complement existing collections on campus. The selection following does not represent any one trend in the collectiono Though a student of seventeenthcentury bibliography could well make a study of collecting habits from the Forbes stock, the sixteenth-century material is simply not extensive enough for meaningful trends to be established» The core of the material is Biblical commentarieso A seventeenth-century trend in Forbes' library, the emphasis on church and state, is reflected in the Elizabethan controversial literatiire, some of which appears below.