May 31, 2010

Liana Lupas stands out in New York, even by the standards of a city that defines itself with superlatives and seems to have world-class specialists in every conceivable discipline. She calls herself "the only librarian in the world who takes care of one book."

Of course, that book is "the" Book, the Bible. And in two decades with the American Bible Society and the Museum of Biblical Art, Lupas has been responsible for a collection that includes more than 45,000 books of Scripture printed in more than 2,000 languages during six centuries.

"Each and every one is important to me, whether it was a pamphlet printed last month or a first edition printed before 1500. They are part of the same story and should be treated with respect," Lupas said.

Lupas trained as a classicist in her native Romania, where she earned her doctorate in Greek and Latin. She worked at the University of Bucharest for 21 years before joining her husband in New York in 1984.

"I came as a refugee from the communists," Lupas said. Her husband spent many years in labor camps in Romania and the Soviet Union, and the couple was determined to live in freedom with their young daughter, she said.

With a small child at home, Lupas took a job as a library assistant, shelving books at the New York University law library and studied for her master's in library science at Columbia University. A research project for her studies brought her to the American Bible Society, a venerable 193-year-old institution dedicated to making the Bible available to every person in a language and format each can understand and afford.

"I had seen the place as a tourist and knew they had an extraordinary collection," Lupas said. "I was also conscious of my accent and figured that ABS was a Christian organization and they might be polite, even kind, to me."

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