Martin Bodmer

[1] His mother ran a literary salon which was frequented by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Paul Valéry, a friend of the family.

He studied a few semesters of philosophy and in 1921 he founded the Gottfried Keller Prize, a renowned Swiss literary award.

He started collecting rare books at the age of 16 and devoted all his life to create an extraordinary library of world literature.

Bodmer selected the works centering on what he saw as the five pillars of world literature: the Bible, Homer, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[2] Bodmer amassed 150,000 works in eighty languages, including first editions of major works, the Papyrus 66 which is one of the oldest almost completely preserved manuscripts of John's Gospel (2nd century), the original of Grimms' Fairy Tales, the only copies of the Gutenberg Bible and the Shakespeare First Folio in Switzerland, a string quintet by Mozart, the prose version of Gotthold Lessing's Nathan the Wise, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Thomas Mann's Lotte in Weimar, original editions of Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust, and valuable papyri, known as Bodmer Papyri, from ancient times, including a papyrus manuscript dating to the third century of the complete Dyskolos, an Ancient Greek comedy by Menander,[7] which was recovered and published in 1959.