Thomas Kimball Brooker
Thomas Kimball Brooker (born October 1, 1939) is a scholar, bibliophile and businessman. He graduated from Yale University in 1962 and served as a Navy lieutenant in the Supply Corps from 1962 to 1966. He earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1968; his master’s thesis was Rare Books as a Hedge against Devaluation and Inflation. He earned an M.A. in Art History from the University of Chicago in 1989 and a Ph.D. there in 1996, with dissertations on the diffusion of binding styles in the 16th century and the rise of the vertical library.
He began working at Morgan Stanley in New York in 1968, becoming vice president in 1973 and managing director in 1976. Since 1989 he has been president of Barbara Oil Company. He has served on the boards of the NYSE Chicago and the Morgan Library & Museum, and he has been active in bibliophile circles, including the Grolier Club (member since 1962) and the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie (president 2006–2013).
In 1992 he received the Sir Thomas More Medal for Book Collecting, and the University of Chicago endowed the T. Kimball Brooker Undergraduate Book Collecting Prize in 1994. Brooker has built a major collection of more than 1,300 sixteenth-century French and Italian books in original bindings and about 1,000 Aldines (1490s–1590s), the largest Aldine collection to come to market in over a century. The collection was offered at Sotheby’s as Bibliotheca Brookeriana: The T. Kimball Brooker Library of Renaissance Books and Bindings (2023–2025).
He is a trustee of the Morgan Library & Museum and the Newberry Library, and he funds the annual Rare Book School scholarship. In 2020 he sponsored the Morgan Library exhibition Poetry and Patronage: The Laubespine-Villeroy Library Rediscovered.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 07:18 (CET).