Ransom Center News
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The Associated Press Associate Press Television Reporter Frazier Moore highlights the absence of "muss or fuss" required to access the "treasury" of online postings of footage from the Ransom Center's holdings of The Mike Wallace Interview. The article cites the historical importance of the interview subjects, and the pertinence of their discussions to our modern world. |
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NPR Weekend Edition NPR Weekend Edition Sunday host Liane Hansen interviews Associate Director and Hobby Foundation Librarian Richard Oram about rejection letters that publishing house Alfred A. Knopf Inc. sent to famous authors, including one to Jack Kerouac for On the Road. The Ransom Center houses the Alfred A. Knopf Inc. collection. |
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The New Yorker The Harry Ransom Center is featured in the June 11 & 18 summer fiction issue of The New Yorker in D. T. Max's article, Final Destination: Why do the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas? The article explores how "The Ransom Center, under Staley's leadership, easily outmaneuvers rivals such as Yale, Harvard and the British Library." Complementing the piece is a slideshow of images shot by photographer Dan Winters. |
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C-SPAN Radio Kate Holliday, Assistant Professor of Art History at Southwestern University, presented "Humanism and Modernism: The Idea of American Art Deco" on Thursday, February 8, 2007, at the Ransom Center. Holliday's lecture explored how skyscrapers, the most American of buildings, were symbols of this humanist approach to architecture in the 1920s. |
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Southern Living "Texan adjectives . . . first, largest, [and] most" are used to describe the Harry Ransom Center in the article "40 Reasons Why I Love Texas." The Center appeared among Dr. Pepper, high school football, and South by Southwest. Gary Ford expresses his admiration of "the world's first photograph, a Gutenberg Bible, and 36 million literary manuscripts" residing in Texas at the Ransom Center. |
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Elle Décor A recent article in Elle Décor magazine that profiled Austin, Texas, cited the Harry Ransom Center as a 'must-see' and an Austin landmark. As the author of the article notes, the University of Texas "can brag not just about its national champion Longhorns, but also its top ranked cultural institutions, such as the recently renovated Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center." |
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Texas Monthly The Harry Ransom Center appeared among the bluebonnets, barbeque and big ranches that Texas Monthly noted in its April issue entitled, "75 Things We Love About Texas." Contributor Kathryn Rodemann described her attraction to the Center: "...what keeps me coming back to the University of Texas's unplumbable cultural repository are its more intimate gems: John Steinbeck's original draft of East of Eden. Gertrude Stein's letters. E.E. Cummings's artwork. All I have to do is flash a photo ID and the world is mine." |
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Celebrating 25 Years The conservation department at the Ransom Center celebrates 25 years of service in the field of conservation and preservation. Since its inception in 1980 the Center's conservation department has remained a pioneer in the conservation of library materials. Charged with the care of the Center's collections, the department addresses ongoing challenges in the areas of treatment, preventive care, research and education. Conservation efforts are an integral part of the Center's mission to preserve and make accessible the creations of our cultural heritage through the highest standards of cataloging, conservation, and collection management. |
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The New York Times Book Review Rachel Donadio's article concerns the millions of e-mails written by authors and editors that may someday have great value to archivists and biographers. The question is how many of the e-mails have or will vanish with the click of a mouse. The piece notes that the Ransom Center has begun to collect e-mail correspondence along with their collection of author's papers. Kris Kiesling, the center's associate director of technical services, laments that although many e-mails are printed, larger collections of them are still in their original form, and the sheer quantity makes it challenging to archive. |
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CBS News Sunday Morning CBS News Sunday Morning's piece profiles the Ransom Center's holdings after the Center completed its $14.5 million renovation, a project that created 40,000 square feet of new public space. Sunday Morning takes viewers on a tour of the Center's galleries and reading room as well as behind the scene visits to view holdings such as Jack Kerouac's notebook for On the Road, screen tests from Gone With the Wind, and the Erle Stanley Gardner Study, a room that replicates the detective novelist's writing cabin. |
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Southern Living The travel piece touches on such notable items as Arthur Miller's personal notebooks, Gertrude Stein's pens, and the "the 1929 letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Blanche Knopf where he conjugates the verb 'to cocktail.'" It ends with an enthusiastic quote from a Seattle resident who toured the Center while visiting his daughter at the University of Texas: "It's unbelievable. This is truly an undiscovered jewel — a real gem." |
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"Austin Now" The station has produced a multi-part series about the Ransom Center. Episodes focus on such areas as the film collection, the art collection, rare books and performing arts. The opening segment is more general, exploring what the center is and what its 2003 renovations mean to the Austin community. |
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New York Times The article previews the New York premiere of the Tennessee Williams play "Spring Storm." Williams wrote it while a student at the University of Iowa, but his classmates received it poorly and he could not find a producer. He filed it away and it went unnoticed. "For years 'Spring Storm' was in the Williams archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1996 it was unearthed and given a staged reading at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan." From there, the play was published individually, reprinted in a volume of Williams plays, and staged in regional theaters in Austin and Mill Valley, California. |
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Texas Monthly Author John Spong's piece touts the holdings, and assesses the legacy of Director Thomas F. Staley, who "has pushed the HRC to take a chance on the first editions of contemporary authors like Jonathan Franzen and the McSweeney's crowd." It says the "the only university libraries consistently mentioned in the same breath are the Beinecke at Yale and the Houghton at Harvard" and calls the photography collection "one of the finest in the world." Ten shots of collection items accompany the story, among them: e.e. cummings' paint box, Napoleon's death mask, and a postcard from Jean Cocteau. |
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Los Angeles Times The front-page story says the Ransom Center renovation "mirrors a trend by exhibiting its trove of literary papers and artifacts, both scholarly and mundane" and cites similar efforts undertaken by peer institutions like the Morgan Library, the Huntington Library and the Getty Research Institute. It includes images of such holdings as the Norman Bel Geddes automobile model, Gloria Swanson's "Sunset Boulevard" sunglasses and a certificate Napoleon signed conferring the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor on Camille Frederick Gaulieu in 1812. The article also hints at the creative trajectories captured in the archives: "The center's D.H. Lawrence files, for instance, show the novelist's three false starts in trying to title that book about Lady Chatterley: 'Tenderness," "My Lady's Keeper" and 'John Thomas and Lady Jane.'" |
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The Guardian Columnist John Sutherland devotes his opening paragraphs to the looting of the Baghdad National Museum but says "there is more than one kind of vandalism. We, in Britain, specialise in the vandalism of indifference." The result is that the country is losing the papers of its contemporary writers to American institutions, the Ransom Center chief among them. Sutherland cites the Center's renovation and aggressive acquisitions as evidence of its clout. "There are those who cast institutions such as the Ransom Center as genteel brigands — looters with bulging wallets rather than AK47s. They are not. They do what we should be doing and they do it superbly well." |
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Travel and Leisure Writer Jim Lewis calls the Center "one of the best kept secrets in the nation" and says "its collection of literary and photographic artifacts is surpassed in size and quality only by those of the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library." He then delves into the means by which founder Harry Ransom acquired so many collections and the reactions his methods drew: "The British and the French complained that these Texans were pillaging their heritage." |
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New York Times The article leads with an anecdote about Marlon Brando's address book, which it calls "part of the collection of literary and cultural treasures" at the Ransom Center. It uses the renovations to profile a Center that Ferdinand Mount, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, says is so preeminent "there's nowhere like it in the U.S.A. and its only rival for 20th century material in Britain is the British Library." The piece highlights the collection, quotes peer institution officials for context, and ends with Director Thomas F. Staley saying: "Acquisition never stops. The difference is that now we're finally going to be able to show off our collection in a real museum setting." |
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National Public Radio Host Todd Mundt interviews Director Thomas F. Staley about all facets of the Ransom Center. Staley touches on the institutional history, the career of Harry Ransom, the renovation, the importance of collecting coherently rather than pell-mell, and the diplomacy of acquisition. Some insights are on the inflating prices of manuscripts and the challenge of convincing authors to part with their papers. "You are asking someone for his or her intellectual and imaginative outpouring. Some writers look at it simply as the detritus of the creative process and don't have a great attachment to it. Others find it deeply disturbing to part with it even though they haven't looked at it in 20 years... What we offer, and what great libraries such as this offer, is a great safe home where the material is conserved, where the material is protected, and in a way it gratifies the writer's position in the canon." |
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Austin American-Statesman This three-day series explores all aspects of the Center, from the "$1 billion collection" to the conservation department that has turned The University of Texas into "one of the country's top training centers for conservation of literary and photographic material." Other items include a timeline history of acquisitions, a rundown of past controversies, a survey of the construction, review of the current exhibition ("From Gutenberg to Gone with the Wind"), and profiles of leading Center figures: namesake Harry Ransom, current director Thomas F. Staley, and John Kirkpatrick, the longtime curator of British manuscripts. Reporter Michael Barnes says the Center is "ranked among the top three American cultural archives of its kind" but is "better known in London, Paris and New York than in Austin." He predicts that will change when the renovations are completed, then quotes Dr. Staley as saying, "We will open for business a transformed institution." |
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New York Times The piece offers background on the Atlantic Monthly's impending printing of an unpublished Mark Twain novelette, A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage. "Twain scholars who have read the manuscript call it 'thin,' 'slight' and 'contrived,'" but it sheds light on the relationship between the author and his contemporaries, notably William Dean Howells, with whom he wanted to launch a writing contest in the Atlantic Monthly. Howells and others did not take to Twain's idea, so "the manuscript ended up at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Tex., where it languished." A lawyer with the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library — home to a substantial Twain collection — learned of the forgotten story and pursued it. |
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"Antiques Roadshow" The second of the two Austin-based episodes opens with a tour of the Ransom Center, which host Dan Elias calls "one of the great libraries in the world." The piece includes shots of such Center staples as the handwritten draft of Absalom, Absalom, Anne Sexton's typewriter, and the Gone with the Wind storyboards. Director Thomas F. Staley shares Harry Ransom's motivation for founding the Center: "He believed understanding the creative process was as important as studying the final works." Elias concludes thusly: "Today the Ransom Center continues to acquire items from contemporary writers and artists and to pass out grants and fellowships to scholars from all over the world." |
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The Guardian The article argues that the British Library should pursue collections more aggressively. It says the recent purchase of Dickens materials suggests the institution wants to develop its holdings but still, Jon Sutherland writes, it should go a step further and follow the model of the Ransom Center, which is "very well endowed and... prepared to buy — and pay top dollar — while authors are still alive and in their prime." |
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