Throughout the 20th century, vast amounts of books from all over the world were imported to the U.S. to build massive research libraries. In Latin America, U.S. booksellers and librarians avidly pursued the private collections of authors and scholars, sometimes dispersing them in order to build the holdings of the repositories elsewhere. Traces left by previous owners are revealing, but are also often neglected as these materials were seldom considered “rare books” and thus have not received the same amount of attention from book historians or bibliographers.
