The items below have been chosen to indicate the range of older material in the Oliver Collection, but represent only a small portion of its total holdings. Individual titles are cataloged in the library's on-line catalogue USCAN.

The collection was formed by Prof. James Willard Oliver (1912-2001). Prof. Oliver (Ph.D. Harvard 1949) taught at the University of Florida and at the University of Southern California before moving to the University of South Carolina in 1964, as Professor and first Head of the new Department of Philosophy. Through Professor Oliver's generosity, his Hume collection was transferred to the University in 1997. In the following years, Prof. Oliver also transferred his substantial collections of works by and about Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and of modern American logic, notably the logic of of W. V. Quine (1908-2000), with whom Prof. Oliver had worked at Harvard.