The Gutenberg Bible and Beyond

Meet Thomas Hyry of the Houghton Library at Harvard University. He’s part of our new series about great archivists who trained at the Bentley and are doing important work in the field.

By Katie Vloet

Hi Tom, nice to meet you! Tell us about the work you do at Harvard.

I’m the associate university librarian for archives and special collections and the Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library at Harvard. In addition to Houghton Library, Harvard’s premiere home for rare books, manuscripts, and literary and performing archives, I oversee the Harvard University Archives, the Harvard Film Archive, the Fine Arts Library, and the Eda K. Loeb Music Library. My work involves a lot of strategy, management, budgets, fundraising, running teams, that sort of thing.

With so many management duties on your plate, I’m guessing you have less time in the archives.

It’s a terrible irony—you get drawn into archival work through your interest in the collections, but if your career progresses into leadership and administration, you engage with them less and less. But I have brilliant colleagues who work more directly with our collections and users—they are very talented and dedicated, and I’ve found that trusting them is a good approach.

What kind of training did you receive at the Bentley?

While a graduate student in the archives track of the School of Information, I took a course then known as the Archives Practicum, based at the Bentley, and was assigned a collection to process. Archival work clicked in for me pretty quickly. I created a finding aid for Brian Williams [now an assistant director and archivist for university history at the Bentley], and he said, “You’ve really never done one of these before? You seem to think like an archivist.” Brian gave me a job and I worked at the Bentley for almost a year before beginning my professional career at Yale.

What stands out from your time at the Bentley?

Well, it’s coming up on 30 years, but one thing I remember is that I got to help pack up and accession some of the Jim Toy collection. Toy was a pioneer in the gay rights movement in Michigan, and his collection really demonstrated to me what a courageous activist he was, especially at the time. He seemed pretty heroic to me.

What are some of your favorite items at the Harvard archives?

It’s very hard to choose. We have one of only 48 surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible, and one of only 23 that is complete. It’s in two volumes, and one of them is always on display. It was given to Harvard by the family of Harry Elkins Widener, who was a rare book collector. He and his father perished on the Titanic and his mother Eleanor funded the construction of a new library at Harvard as a memorial to him.

Were you interested in libraries even as a child in Ironwood, Michigan?

Ironwood, in the Upper Peninsula, is as far as you can get from Ann Arbor and still be in Michigan. It never occurred to me that I might become an archivist and librarian when I grew up, but I was a library rat in high school and college. Whenever I go back, I visit the library.