1. In their introduction to the collections Donald F. Anderle, the library's associate director for special collections, and Robert Rainwater, the curator of the Spencer collection, note trie uncertainty that surrounds the provenance of this particular collection. They state: “In a lapse that is difficult for any library to acknowledge, records of that acquisition have been lost…. One conjectural provenance was suggested in 1951 by Gurgis Awad, chief librarian of the Iraq Museum and a member of the Arab Academy … [who] postulates that this 1934 purchase represents the remains of the private library of that illustrious Baghdad scholar Ibrahim Fasih Haidari. That informed opinion would seem to be verified by the authorship and dedications within the manuscripts themselves.”.