About Us
The Founders and Their Quest for Knowledge
The World Herb Library was founded by three practicing herbalists with decades of experience and a passion for books, who built their collections over the last fifty years by combing dusty bookshops around the United States, Europe, and Asia, and finally from online catalogues.
Robert Brucia, Co-Founder
“I’ve always been a collector and after starting my botanical extraction company in 1975 I began collecting 19th century dispensatories, formularies and pharmacopoeias in order to study pharmacy and find formulas for making the herbal product that I sold. This was a fun time, searching old book stores and finding some of the rarest items.
After a few years of collecting this type of material and having shelves full of dispensatories, formularies, books on materia medica (medical uses of herbs), Eclectic medical text and journals, I came across a copy of Woodville’s Medical Botany. I hadn’t known or seen a botanical book so beautiful, over 300 hand-colored plates of medicinal plants. That must have been when the bibliomania virus hit me so hard. My search for colored-plate botanicals and hand-colored herbals began and never stopped for over 30 years.
The years were spent in dusty bookshops with bad lighting, searching book dealer’s catalogs, visiting the book fairs in London, LA, and San Francisco, and trying to outbid other collectors at fancy auction houses. So many treasures have been put together in this library. Rare herbals like the 1529 Grete Herball, the 1565 Mattioli materia medica and the very rare first published illustrated herbal text, Apuleius Barbarus’s Herbarium (c. 1481). Many of the great botanists and herbalists along with their herbals are represented here—Fuchs, Brunfels, l’Obel, Dodoens, Turner, Parkinson and Gerard—plus numerous works of medical botany, ethnobotany, floras and plant folklore. You can view the full Brucia botanical library digitized here on the World Herbal Library.
After having spent over 30 years collecting and building one of the world’s finest private botanical libraries, it’s wonderful to be able to share digital copies with everyone through the World Herbal Library website.
The World Herbal Library has brought together books from so many of the great libraries of the last one hundred years, the incredible botanical book collection of Kenneth K. Mackenzie, the Robert de Belder collection, the Juan Carlos Ahumada collection of great herbals and the Massachusetts Horticultural Society sale in 2002. Having the Brucia botanical library along with the Dr. Christopher Hobbs botanical collection included is truly an honor.”
~ Bob Brucia, Botanical Book Collector, Manufacturing Herbalist, PhytoPharmaceutical consultant
Christopher Hobbs, Ph.D., Co-Founder
Present Positions: Research scientist, herbalist, clinician (Licensed acupuncturist, herbalist, California), consultant to the natural products industry, author, public speaker; scientific advisor and legal consultant on natural products, herbs, Mushroom Harvest/Mushroom Wellness.
Christopher Hobbs is a third-generation botanist and fourth-generation herbalist with a lineage going back to at least the early nineteenth century. His great-grandmother and grandmother were community herbalists, and his dad and grandfather were professors of botany.
Dr. Hobbs received training from his dad in botany from a young age as he was growing up, developed an interest in natural health and herbal medicine from his grandmother’s herbal writings, and started scientific training in chemistry and botany in the early 1980s. In 1982 he was asked to teach botany and medical botany at one of the first formal institutions of learning in herbal medicine in the United States, the Platonic Academy founded by Dr. Paul Lee, Ph.D. (Harvard), an important figure in the early herbal and permaculture communities.
Dr. Hobbs’s formal scientific training began in 1984 with two years of general and organic chemistry, anatomy, physiology and other foundational courses.
Throughout the late 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s he authored twenty-two books on herbal medicine and natural wellness, including a Peterson Field Guide on more than 600 medicinal plants that grow throughout the western United States; was hired by Dupont to construct a complete herbal database backed by rigorous scientific evidence; and continued teaching or lecturing at naturopathic schools, Yale, Stanford, University of California, Santa Cruz, and numerous conferences.
During these years, starting about 1977, he began to develop an interest in collecting books on herbal medicine, history of medicine, ethnobotany, medical botany, and pharmacy and botany. In the early 1980s, he realized that to go deeper with herbal medicine it would be necessary to collect books from many other cultures, back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. For the next forty years he traveled extensively, lecturing at conferences, meeting with other herbalists, and whenever possible, seeking out (through the phone book in those days) rare book dealers throughout the United States and Europe with a passionate drive, finally putting together a research library of nearly 8,000 books and journals, many of them rare.
In 1989 the first foundational meeting of the only national professional herbalists organization, the American Herbalist Guild, was at his home in Santa Cruz. After co-founding the organization, he and others have been on the peer-review board, carefully evaluating hundreds of new professional members through the present while the organization has grown to international recognition. In 1992 he began training in Traditional Chinese Medicine after graduation and licensing in California as a primary health care provider, in Hangzhou China at a traditional medicine hospital. After returning to the United States, he started practicing in his own clinic, and finally in the early 2000s, in an integrated practice that included medical doctors.
In 2006 he completed more science training, leading to a Ph.D. program in the Integrative Biology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, with Bruce Baldwin (Jepson Scholar at the Jepson Herbaria) particularly as major professor, and Brent Mishler, as well as Gary Takeoka (chemist) as mentors throughout the training. Focus areas for the lab work and other research was in medicinal plant chemistry, evolutionary biology, phylogenetics (how plants are related to one another over evolutionary time using genetics), essential oils, flavor and fragrance chemistry, use of various chromatography instruments, and extensive analytical work on medicinal plants and fungi. Publications in peer-reviewed journals followed.
Since graduation, Dr. Hobbs has been involved in writing Christopher Hobbs’s Medicinal Mushrooms, the Essential Guide (Storey Publishing), as well as teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and acting as a legal consultant to Bayne Associates in Washington, DC, on herb products and dietary supplements regarding good manufacturing practices, safety, efficacy, extraction techniques, and other areas, mostly science-based. Finally, he has served as the science officer for a respected mushroom products manufacturer, Mushroom Harvest/Mushroom Wellness, performing analytical and research chemistry, and for several years he worked on evaluating DNA barcoding for identification to species of common herbal products with Alkemist Labs.