Evro Layton personal archive

Evro Layton (née Evrydike Zeniou) (1924-2005), bibliographer, was born in Larnaca, Cyprus on June 28, 1924. At age nineteen, she emigrated to the United States to study piano at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she met her husband, composer and academic Billy Jim Layton; the two were marred in 1949, and the couple had two children. Layton received her MB in the History and literature of music from Yale University School of Music in 1951, and her MLS from the Simmons School of Library Science in 1958. From 1952 to 1954, she was a translator and secretary for the American Meteorological Society. Layton worked as a special bibliographer in the Harvard College Library from 1958 to 1968, leaving for one year in 1963-1964 to work as the Acting Assistant Librarian of the Gennadius Library in Athens. While at Harvard, she worked as a cataloger and then as a Greek bibliographer; she oversaw the collection of medieval and modern Greece in the United States. Layton curated an exhibition at Houghton Library from December 1987 to February 1988 on five centuries of books and manuscripts in modern Greek. Layton was also a Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellow from 1968 to 1970, which allowed her to conduct research on the history of Greek printing, and she was an active member of the Modern Greek Studies Association. Layton published several books and articles, including her groundbreaking work, The Sixteenth Century Greek Book in Italy: Printers and Publishers for the Modern World. From the 1960s through the early 1990s, Layton and her husband lived in New York, while Mr. Layton was a professor at Stony Brook; in 1992, the couple returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts to be with their children, Alexis and Daphne. Upon its founding in 1968, the Modern Greek Studies Association enlisted Layton as its first bibliographer. Two years later, in 1970, Layton formed and directed the Modern Greek Studies Association Cooperative Library Project in New York, where she reviewed the collections of several institutional libraries, advising them on book selections from Greece and Cyprus. Layton died at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on June 8, 2005.