Gershon Legman, 1917-1999, was a folklorist specializing in eroticism in folklore. He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and worked in New York City for the early part of his career. He was a self-taught independent scholar; he worked part-time for the physician and sexological researcher Robert Latou Dickinson at the New York Academy of Medicine; for two years he was a bibliographer and book-buyer for the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. His books include The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (1964), which the Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality calls "by far the most important study of eroticism in folklore and folk song that has ever appeared in the English language"; The Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968); and Love & Death: A Study in Censorship (1949), which argues that violence and not sex is the real problem in American media. He supposedly coined the phrase "make love, not war" during a talk at the University of Ohio in 1963, allegedly invented the vibrating dildo in the 1930s, and also popularized origami in the United States.

Peter Opie, 1918-1982, and Iona Opie, 1923-2017, were a married couple specializing in children's folklore. Peter Opie was born in the British Protectorate in Cairo and educated at Eton. He married Iona Margaret Balfour in 1943, and they began studying nursery rhymes together after the birth of their first child in 1944. They wrote The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951), which is the standard source on the subject, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), and Children's Games in Street and Playground (1969). They donated their collection of children's literature from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and their collection of children's games and songs to the British Library.