He was avoracious collector of books and when he ran out of space for them in hiscollege rooms (where he lived) he acquired a little house nearby for theoverflow. He was generous, often giving books away, and yet he still left18,000 volumes when he died, bequeathed to the library he had overseen

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 largest pri-vate collections reached 3,000 or 4,500 volumes in the late sixteenth century and tens of thousands of volumes in the mid- eighteenth century. (Hans Sloan owned 45,000 books and 4,000 manuscripts at his death in 1753.)194