The collection was the personal library of Claude Delaval Cobham, CMG, MA, BCL, MRAS (1842-1915), Commissioner of the District of Larnaca from 1879-1907. Sir Harry Luke, who served as Private Secretary to the High Commissioner of Cyprus, supplied the following account of Cobham for the December 1957 edition of Library Notes (Simpson 1957, p. 1).

'Cobham was a 'scholar and a gentleman' whose love for Cyprus and private means enabled him to regard his appointment to the new British Government set up in Cyprus in 1878 not as the first stage of a career but as a life-long vocation. Thus, fortunately for Cyprus, he was content to remain in Larnaca as Commissioner of the District for the 28 years from 1879 to his retirement in 1907 and to continue to live there after retirement until failing health ultimately compelled him reluctantly to return to England.

During his working life Cobham devoted the leisure from his official duties, and in his retirement his whole time, to the study of the history of Cyprus and of foreign languages, and to the gracious hospitality which he extended to his friends from many parts in his beautiful and interesting house. For he had brought, and for his many years in Cyprus inhabited, the early 18th-century Consulate of the English Levant Company in Old Larnaca with its contemporary painted official coats of arms adorning the walls of the great living-room and a spacious and lovely garden stretching beyond it, hidden behind high walls of sun-dried mud brick. In this historic abode, now alas in a lamentable state of dilapidation, he housed his unique collection of books on Cyprus, now in the Library of the Royal Empire Society'.