Harry Ransom Center

• 1. Introduction

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  The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds 36 million literary manuscripts. Alongside them sit one million rare books, five million photographs, and more than 100,000 works of art. The institution describes itself as an archive, a library, and a museum at once. It gathers literary and cultural artifacts from the Americas and Europe, with the stated aim of advancing the study of the arts and humanities. How does a university in Texas come to hold a collection on this scale? Who chose what deserved saving, and what did they choose? And which objects, among all those millions, matter most?

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• 2. A Founder's Ambition

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  In 1957, Harry Ransom founded the Humanities Research Center. His goal was plain: to expand the rare books and manuscript holdings of the University of Texas. His first notable acquisitions were the Edward Alexander Parsons Collection, the T. Edward Hanley Collection, and the Norman Bel Geddes Collection.

  Ransom held the official title of director only from 1958 to 1961. Even so, he presided over a period of great expansion in the collections for years afterward. That influence ended in 1971, when he resigned as chancellor of the University of Texas System. In 1972, the center moved into the building it still occupies.

  The founder's name came to the institution later. In 1983, the Humanities Research Center was renamed the Harry Ransom Center. By then, the man who started it had already handed the work to a series of directors, and the first of them took the post in 1961.

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• 3. Directors and Their Prizes

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  F. Warren Roberts served as official director from 1961 to 1976. He brought in Helmut Gernsheim's collection of photographs and the archives of the authors D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, and Evelyn Waugh. In 1968, he added the Carlton Lake Collection.

  Two interim directors, John Payne and then Carlton Lake, guided the center from 1976 to 1980. During that stretch, in 1978, the center obtained its complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible.

  Decherd Turner arrived as director in 1980 and pushed the collecting in several directions at once. He secured the Giorgio Uzielli Collection of Aldine editions, the Anne Sexton archive, and the Robert Lee Wolff Collection of 19th-century fiction. The Pforzheimer Collection also came under his watch. So did the archives of David O. Selznick and Gloria Swanson, and the Ernest Lehman Collection.

  Thomas F. Staley took over when Turner retired in 1988. His tenure brought a copy of the Plantin Polyglot Bible and more than 100 literary archives. It also brought the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers, which preserve the notes, interviews, and manuscripts that reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein produced while covering the scandal.

  In September 2013, Stephen Enniss became director. He had previously been head librarian of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Under him, the center kept adding writers' archives, including those of Kazuo Ishiguro, Arthur Miller, and Ian McEwan. Two of the center's best known objects, though, greet visitors in the main lobby.

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• 4. Lobby and Reading Room

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  One of only 21 complete Gutenberg Bibles known to exist stands on permanent display in the main lobby. Close to it is Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras, made around 1826. It is regarded as the first successful permanent photograph taken from nature.

  Beyond the lobby, the center keeps a reading room for scholars. It also runs galleries that rotate exhibitions of works and objects from the collections. In the 2015-16 academic year, researchers made nearly 6,000 visits. Those visits fed the publication of more than 145 books.

  The center names three areas of special strength: modern literature, performing arts, and photography. Literature comes first, and it fills more shelves than any visitor could browse in a day.

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• 5. Pages and Manuscripts

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  Three copies of Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio belong to the literary holdings. So does a suppressed 1865 first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, one of only 23 copies known to exist. The center also owns a first edition of Os Lusíadas, the Portuguese book by Luis de Camões printed in 1572, and the Cardigan manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

  Some objects feel personal. Edgar Allan Poe's writing desk is here. So is the journal Jack Kerouac kept while preparing to write On the Road, which appeared in 1957. The personal libraries of Gabriel García Márquez, Alice Corbin Henderson, Ezra Pound, Evelyn Waugh, David Foster Wallace, and the Coleridge family are kept as well.

  The manuscript collections read like a roll call of modern writing. James Joyce, Graham Greene, Lewis Carroll, Doris Lessing, Norman Mailer, and Carson McCullers are all represented. So are J. M. Coetzee, Don DeLillo, Billy Collins, T. C. Boyle, Julia Alvarez, Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Bowen, and T. H. White. The list continues with Erle Stanley Gardner, Marthe Bibesco, George Atherton Aitken, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Brian Moore, T. E. Lawrence, and the magazine and press McSweeney's.

  Aleister Crowley has a corner of his own. The center holds a rare 1904 first edition of his The Book of the Law, also called Liber AL, the Vellum books, and the Holy Book of Thelema. It has other original Crowley first editions too, along with tarot cards that he colored by hand.

  Thomas James Wise appears through the bibliographies and catalogs he created. The center also keeps manuscripts and letters that relate to his forgeries and his life. The records of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf are held here, and so is a large collection of rare and valuable comic books.

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• 6. Stage Archives

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  John Wilkes Booth's personal production promptbook for Richard III survives in the collections. So does David Garrick's diary from his 1751 trip to Paris, which once belonged to Harry Houdini. Houdini's own papers are held here as well.

  Early printed drama has its own extensive library. One of its rarest items is a copy of the 1594 quarto of the True Tragedie of Richard the Third, published by an anonymous writer. Only three copies of that quarto are known. A 1730 manuscript of George Frideric Handel's Coronation Anthems, made by his principal copyist, sits among the music.

  The Ballets Russes left costumes behind, including pieces from Narcisse and The Rite of Spring. Design holdings include two of Pablo Picasso's costume designs and a set design for The Three-Cornered Hat. A different kind of theatre history lives in the original manuscripts of George Aiken's 1852 stage adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The archive of its producing company, George C. Howard, is kept with them.

  The papers of playwrights and performers fill a long list. They include Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Stella Adler, Peter O'Toole, and Eli Wallach. Organizational archives cover B. J. Simmons and Company, the Theatre Guild, and the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.

  Photographs and designs round out the picture. There is a historic collection of 19th- and 20th-century portrait photography of actors and dancers. Production photography comes from Joseph Abeles and Leo Friedman, Fred Fehl, and Bob Golby. Design archives belong to Gordon Conway, Eldon Elder, and Boris Aronson. Cinema takes up the same impulse, beginning with costumes from Gone with the Wind.

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• 7. Film and Television

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  Salvador Dalí designed props for the dream sequence of the 1945 film Spellbound, but they went unused. The center holds those unused props today. Gloria Swanson's sunglasses from the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard are also kept here.

  The David O. Selznick Collection supplies selected costumes, script drafts, storyboards, and audition media from Gone with the Wind. Other film papers belong to Jay Presson Allen, Lewis Allen, Edward Carrick, Nicholas Ray, Alfred Junge, King Vidor, and Robert De Niro. Lorne Michaels, the producer of television comedy, is represented too.

  Television has a place of its own. The American series Mad Men is documented through scripts, drafts, notes, props, costumes, digital video, and research material.

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• 8. Art and History

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  Frida Kahlo is represented by two paintings, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, from 1940, and Still Life (with Parrot and Fruit). A complete set of Pablo Picasso's Vollard Suite, made between 1930 and 1937, belongs to the collection as well.

  Sculpture arrives in an unexpected form. Eric Gill, the creator of the Gill Sans typeface, carved a she-wolf from stone and coated it with gold leaf. The gilding has since worn off. Busts of various writers are on display in the lobby and reading room. The center holds large amounts of art made by writers, along with portraits of literary figures. A facsimile of Maurice Ravel's 1908 piano suite Gaspard de la nuit adds music to the mix.

  History brings maps and documents. A 16th-century globe designed by Gerardus Mercator sits beside the Kraus Map Collection, which gathers 16th- and 17th-century cartography. An official declaration by Napoleon Bonaparte is held here. So are the love letters of Maximilian I, the Mexican emperor, and his wife Carlota, a private correspondence from a doomed throne.

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