History of the Book and Book Arts
The more than eight hundred thousand volumes gathered at the Ransom Center make possible a study of the history of the book from its beginnings in the manuscript period through the twentieth century. Among the several hundred items in the pre-1700 manuscripts collection are Ptolemaic papyri of the third to first century B.C., an eleventh-century Bede codex from the monastery at Tegernsee, the richly illuminated Chronicles (ca. 1450) of Jean Froissart (1337-1404) and the fifteenth-century Belleville Book of Hours. Incunabular holdings (three hundred eighty volumes and four hundred leaves) begin with the Gutenberg Bible of 1455. The Center's copy, on paper, is one of only five complete exemplars in the United States. The Center's Pforzheimer Library holds William Caxton's edition of Lefevre's Historyes of Troye (1474), the first book printed in English, along with six other works by Caxton.
The Center houses a large collection of Aldine Press books (1495-1588), totaling roughly nine hundred volumes. Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813), who directed the Ducal Press of the Duchy of Parma from 1768 until his death, is represented by ninety-eight books, including his Manuale Tipografico, which consists of two large folio volumes. Other important printers well represented in the rare book collection are the Estiennes, the Elseviers, the Plantins, John Baskerville, and Robert and Andrew Foulis.
The Center's holdings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English books, which are among the largest in the United States, will be especially useful to scholars researching the history of the book. Special note should be made of the Queen Anne Collection, containing a large percentage of all English books published from 1702 to 1714.
All of the major fine presses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are represented, with nearly complete runs of several, including the Kelmscott, the Doves, the Golden Cockerel, the Grabhorn, and Nonesuch Presses. The Center also owns a nearly complete set of the Limited Editions Club publications, which is complemented by the archive of the club's parent, the George Macy Co., and original artwork for many of the LEC books. Book holdings also include an extensive collection of reference works on printing and bookbinding, type specimen books, calligraphy manuals from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, color-plate books and about six hundred American, English, and French artists' books. Noteworthy original materials on the book arts may be found in the Eric Gill (1802-1940) papers (type-specimens, alphabets, wood and stone engravings) and the Golden Cockerel Press archive (nearly nine hundred woodblocks and copperplates, as well as correspondence with notable woodcut artists), and notebooks of the English calligrapher Edward Johnston (1872-1944). The Ransom Center holds both a large collection of Dutch prize bindings (1600s-1700s) and the William B. Todd Collection of British Prize Bindings (1600s-1900s) .
The Center's Photography Collection contains a large group of nineteenth-century books illustrated with tipped-in photographs, as well as hundreds of nineteenth- and twentieth-century volumes containing a wide range of early and significant photomechanical images. Among the masterworks are early publications with original mounted photographs, including the first major photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature (1844-46), by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), as well as unique photograph albums, including the Clarkson Stanfield presentation album (1845) by David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848) and five personal albums by Lewis Carroll (C.L. Dodgson, 1832-1898). Also included is a complete run of Alfred Stieglitz's (1864-1946) major periodical, Camera Work (1903-1917). Works range from classic portfolios by Edward Weston (1886-1958), Ansel Adams (1902-1984), and Wright Morris (1910-1998), to artists' books by Ed Ruscha (b.1937), Michael Peven (b.1949), Michael A. Smith (b.1942), Ave Bonar (b.1948), and Limited Editions Club volumes by Edward Steichen (1879-1973), Aaron Siskind (1903-1991), Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), and Edward Ranney (b.1942).
The Ransom Center has an excellent selection of twentieth-century English, American, and French artists' books, with particular strengths in the 1970s and 1980s. Artists include Rufino Tamayo, Henri Matisse (most notably, his Jazz), Jim Dine, Pablo Picasso, and Buckminster Fuller. Related items, such as Robert Rauschenberg's plexiglass book, Shades, may be found in the Art Collection.
