The World's Columbian Exposition | Edward E. Ayer | Collectors and Collections, Private and Curatorial | Endowed Acquisition Funds | International Publication Exchange The creation of the Library's collections commenced in 1894 with initial transfers of books from the libraries of various departments of the World's Columbian Exposition. Chief among these transfers was the collection formed for the Exposition's Department of Ethnology. This collection had been assembled by soliciting donations of books from researchers worldwide who were at that time contributing to the formation of the disciplines that were to become modern anthropological research. The 1,400 titles in this collection are well documented in the surviving manuscript list of its holdings compiled by Charles Staniland Wake (1835-1910), who served as librarian for the Department of Ethnology. Most of the titles on Wake's list are still held by the Library and form the historic core of the Anthropology Department library. Among the geological materials assembled for the Exposition was one of several book collections formed during his career by George Frederick Kunz (1856-1932), mineralogist and gemologist with Tiffany and Company. Judged by its titles alone, this collection might seem somewhat eclectic. In fact its 6,300 titles demonstrate the depth of scholarship Kunz brought to the task. Every work in the collection either bears directly on some aspect of mineralogy, gemology, or metallurgy, or contains sections, chapters or even simple passages illuminating some facet of these subjects. Including one of the Library's two incunables - a 1490 edition of Avicenna - the collection is rich in titles from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Harlow N. Higinbotham (1838-1919), president of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and president of Field Museum from 1897 to 1909, purchased the Kunz collection and presented it to the Library in 1894.