Thomas J. Harrison
The Thomas J. Harrison Bible Collection
The Thomas J. Harrison Collection focuses on the origins of the English Bible. The strength of the collection is a combination of first editions and faithful reprints of the sequence of texts culminating in the King James Version and the English language biblical tradition which ensued. When completed, the collection numbered 312 volumes. The collection was moved to Bridwell from the home of Thomas J. Harrison in Pryor, Oklahoma, in October 1964, through an arrangement with the Harrison Trust. The Harrison Trust generously continued to support the collection by funding the acquisition of rare Bibles through the 1995, when the trust dissolved.
Works of particular significance include a thirteenth-century manuscript of a Latin "Paris" Bible, a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible (c.1455), four incunabular Bibles, an Erasmus New Testament (1519), the Great Bible (1540), the Bishop's Bible (1568), The Rheims New Testament (1582), and both "he" and "she" variants of the first edition of the King James Version (1611).
Other Bibles in the collection include a seventeenth-century Torah Scroll from Kaifeng, China, early American editions of the Bible, and representative printed editions from around the world. The collection also includes a large number of Bibles in Native American dialects dating from the nineteenth-century. Later volumes include the Doves Press Bible (1903-5) and the Golden Cockerel Gospels with decorations furnished by Eric Gill (1931).
Biblia latina. [Northern France, c. 1250]. Manuscript on vellum.
Contents of the Thomas J. Harrison Collection
