 Throughout the Collegiate School's nascence in the early eighteenth century, books were the most valuable assets the school could acquire.Although New Haven Colony founder John Davenport began collecting books for a college library in New Haven in the 1650s, the college is said to have been founded by the gift of “forty folios” in Branford, Connecticut by its ten founding Congregational ministers.All were theological texts, and those surviving are now stored in the Beinecke Library.