original recordings of the theorists at that 1966 structuralism conference.“For years, everyone had said ‘there’s got to be recordings of those lectures.’ Well, we finally found the recordings of those lectures. They were hidden in a cabinet behind a bookshelf behind a couch,” said Liz Mengel, associate director of collections and academic services for the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins.

After Dr. Macksey’s death, a S.W.A.T. team-like group of librarians and conservators spent three weeks combing through his book-filled, 7,400-square-foot house to select 35,000 volumes to add to the university’s libraries.

Dr. Macksey’s book collection clocked in at 51,000 titles, according to his son, Alan, excluding magazines and other ephemera.

During his lifetime, Umberto Eco amassed more than 30,000 books for his personal library.

“The learning process is a two-way affair,” Dr. Macksey said.

He once showed me a Sanskrit volume handwritten in human blood: “You know, Greg, all great writers must work this way.”

Dr. Macksey is known for keeping unconventional hours; he would get about three hours of sleep, and grocery shop in the middle of the night. Until recently, he would volunteer at The Book Thing at 3 am.

Macksey is also responsible for one of his first short films. “When I was at Hopkins, there was no film program. We talked to Dick [about making a short film] and he said ‘let’s do it,’ and we ended up doing a movie in which he has a small part.”

“There was always this rumor that when he was up for his PhD and doing his orals, they couldn’t stump him on anything,” the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, a former student, said. “Finally, exasperated, one of his interviewers decided to ask him about 16th-century French cooking or something and he goes, ‘well that’s great that you should ask that question, because it happens to be one of my hobbies.’”