The prescient and comprehensive collecting efforts of Donald and Mary Hyde have provided America's scholars with unequaled resources for the study of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and their circle. The Hyde collection also encompasses other authors in the eighteenth-century intellectual milieu, with in-depth holdings of Henry Fielding materials. Additional notable holdings include substantial collections dealing with Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, a fine group of Elizabethan works, one of the best gatherings of Japanese manuscripts in the West, English bindings, and miscellaneous manuscripts of important literary and historical figures, among them Jane Austen, Desiderius Erasmus, and King Edward IV of England. As a husband-and-wife collecting team, the Hydes were exemplars of bibliophiles with an intense commitment to the scholarly use of their collection.

The son of Wilby Grimes Hyde, a lawyer, and Helen May Frizell Hyde, Donald Frizell Hyde was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, on 17 April 1909. The Hydes...