Richard Broke Freeman (1 April 1915 – 1 September 1986) was a zoologist, historian of zoology, bibliographer of natural history and book collector.

[3] He was “a meticulous scholar”[2] and a “brilliant bibliographer” who showed “a genuine modesty about his great erudition.”[4] "It is darkly rumored among antiquarian booksellers that R. B. Freeman once missed a completely unrecorded and absurdly rare 1859 second issue of the first edition of The Origin of Species", a reviewer wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, "but this is also said to be the only mistake he has made during a lifetime of persistent scholarship and imaginative detective work in libraries, bookshops, sale-rooms, the attics of country houses and the trunks of the great-aunts of great men.

[4] He rose to the rank of Major with the 111th Rocket Anti-Aircraft Battery, 101st Oxford Home Guard in 1944,[6] and was awarded an MBE for meritorious service.

[4] Through regular contacts with booksellers (antiquarian and otherwise), by attending auctions (including at Sotheby's), visiting libraries, correspondence with scholars, his own studies, and through buying trips to the west country in England and elsewhere, Freeman built up an immense first-hand knowledge of his subjects.

[10] In 1967, Freeman was persuaded by David Esplin, an associate librarian at the University of Toronto, to sell to that institution his Darwin collection – which included some 140 copies of The Origin of Species.

[5] In 1972, the University of Toronto Library offered to buy Freeman's Gosse and natural history collection of some 1,000 volumes, a transaction completed in 1974.

[3] With 466 entries, the book superseded Peter Stageman's privately printed, limited-focus 1955 A Bibliography of the First Editions of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S.