The establishment and early development of the Gibb Memorial Trust is, in no small measure, due to the indefatigable efforts of one of its founder Trustees, Edward Granville Browne. E. G. Browne, a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, was a close friend of E. J. W. Gibb, and on Gibb's early death in 1901, he took up the responsibility of editing and seeing through to publication Gibb's voluminous magnum opus A History of Ottoman Poetry. This he did over the next eight years with impressive dedication, and the later volumes of the History were amongst the first publications of the Gibb Memorial Series. The series itself was funded by the Gibb Memorial Trust, of which Browne was undoubtedly the driving force in its early years. The series (and the Trust more generally) was able to grow and develop through the efforts of Browne and the collection of prominent early-twentieth-century British ‘Orientalists’. Browne's election in 1902 as the Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge added eminence to the Trust and established its mission to produce editions of important Arabic, Persian and Turkish works using the original script. Browne himself – with his linguistic erudition in Persian, Turkish, Arabic and the so-called ‘Indian languages’, as well as his extensive contacts in the academic world – enabled the Trust to recruit the leading scholars of the day, both to publish in the series and to join the Board of Trustees. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the intellectual direction and impetus of the Gibb Memorial Trust were, in large part, due to Browne's single-minded promotion of a very particular focus on the production of high-quality editions of classical texts in Arabic, Turkish and Persian that were essential for an understanding of what later came to be termed the ‘Islamicate’ world. Reflecting Browne's own wide interests, the Trust's ‘First Series’ came to include works of philosophy, history, religion and literature (including both prose and poetry).