Gabriel Harvey was a poet and a writer who generated enough controversy that he was forced out of public life and into a thirty-year retirement. It was difficult for even Harvey 's friends and admirers to get along with him, but all who knew him, including his enemies, respected his intellect and his learning. During his life Harvey developed a collection of books and manuscripts, covering a wide range of topics that exceeded many collections of the era, which provided him the means for a lifetime of intellectual stimulation and satisfaction. Although Harvey 's books were scattered after his death, scholars have meticulously researched public and private library collections to virtually reassemble the collection. Harvey 's marginal annotations reveal his interests and record perceptive observations on rhetoric, mathematics and navigation, astrology, medicine, his contemporaries, and literature. Harvey stands as one of the foremost bibliophiles of the Elizabethan period...