In 2007 Dr. James W. Valentine, Professor Emeritus of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, contributed to the Society his collection of nearly 4,500 volumes of the printed works of Charles Darwin in more than 25 languages of the world.  The Valentine/Darwin Collection promises to be a trove of information about the ways in which Darwin’s powerful ideas moved across cultures and through time. Dr. Valentine’s goal was to place the collection, assembled over 50 years, in a repository where it would have appropriate context, where it would be kept intact as a collection, and where it would be accessible to scholars.  The APS Library, with its vast history of science collections, including the largest collection of Darwin's manuscripts in North America, was pleased to accept the collection on this basis.

“The Art of Making Money Plenty”—rebus attributed to Benjamin Franklin.  From APS broadside collections.

The Library of Benjamin Vaughan, great friend of Benjamin Franklin, was one of the largest in New England at the end of the 18th century, and contains volumes reflecting the varied interests of that great Whig intellectual, including classics from Linnaeus to Locke and Voltaire, but also less well known works on dissenting religion, medical treatises, works on agriculture and education, and novels and children's books of the day.  Until 1991, when Vaughan's descendants presented it to the APS, it had resided in Hallowell, Maine in the home originally built by Benjamin Vaughan, whose brother, John, was the Society's first Librarian.  In 2004 the family made a generous grant to the Library through the Vaughan Homestead Foundation to catalogue and conserve the collection.