Sir Robert Cowan, Prince of California Bookmen, and the Genesis of the UCLA Californiana Collection. He also served as the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library’s first librarian. In 1914 Cowan’s monumental A Bibliography of California and the Pacific West became the first monograph published by the Book Club of California. Kurutz presents an overview of Cowan’s illustrious career, the writing of his bibliography, his work at the Clark Library, and the heroic effort of UCLA to secure Cowan’s Californiana collection. Robert Ernest Cowan was born in Toronto, Canada in 1862. Robert Ernest Cowan collected a wide-array of materials on early California history that would later form the nucleus of the UCLA Department of Special Collections’s holdings in Californiana. Robert Cowan married Marie Margaret Fleissner in 1894 and they had one child, Robert Granniss Cowan. Robert Ernest Cowan died in Los Angeles in May 1942.