HOW DID USC ACQUIRE THE GOMPERZ COLLECTION?
Click Here to read an excerpt from a thesis paper about the Gomperz Collection.
The excerpt examines how USC came to acquire the famed collection, including the hiding of the books in the basement of a building so the Nazis couldn't find it and the intervention of the US State Department to get the books out of Austria and back to the United States safely.
Read the full Excerpt from Thesis, "Selected Heinrich Gomperz's Manuscripts in the Hoose Library", pp. 9-10, by Lynn Merle Grow
Read the complete thesis with the PDF below or this link to the online asset in the USC Digital Library!
GOMPERZ COLLECTION
The Gomperz Library of Philosophy, formed in Vienna by the philosopher-scholars Theodor and Heinrich Gomperz during the latter part of the 19th century and first part of the 20th, was widely regarded as the finest of its kind in private hands.
These volumes include the earliest collected editions of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and individual works such as Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, and Wealth of Nations, 1776. There is also an edition of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740) with marginal corrections in the hand of the author. Also, the collection contains all but one of the books of Immanuel Kant in first edition, as well as all, or virtually all, of the works of the prolific Fichte, Schelling, Wolf and Schopenhauer in their original forms.
For more information: Click Here
HEINRICH GOMPERZ
Heinrich Gomperz was the son of Theodor Gomperz, the famous historian of Greek Philosophy. Heinrich was connected to local positivists in Vienna before the 'Anschluss' and came to USC right after the Nazi takeover of Austria. Both he and his father had been rare book collectors.
Their collection was one of the foundations of the Hoose Library of Philosophy's collections.
