From Gutenberg to Gone With the Wind: Treasures from the Ransom Center
SUCCESS UPON SUCCESS
Julia Margeret Cameron,
Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls
of the King and Other Poems.
Volume I, London, 1875. Plate
10: The Parting of Launcelot
and Guinevere. Albumen print.
1874. Ransom Center
Photography Collection.
Eric Gill, The Golden Calf, 1912.
Polychromed Hoptonwood stone.
Ransom Center Art Collection.
Curtain dress worn by Viven
Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone With the Wind, 1939.
Ransom Center Film Collection.
William Shakespeare, Mr. William
Shakespeares Comedies,
Histories, and Tragedies.
London, 1623. Ransom Center
Collections.
May 3, 2001-May 3, 2002
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum
This major exhibition will publicly display together—for the first time in the Ransom Center’s history—cultural and literary icons that reside within its walls. One hundred and seventy-five items from the collections will be showcased. The objects selected for the exhibition cover the sweep of time from the Middle Ages to the present day and represent all genres housed at the Center—manuscripts, photographs, artwork, film, and ephemera. To view the exhibition will be to get a taste of the breadth and depth of the vast riches found in the Ransom Center.
Unique and priceless cultural treasures such as the Gutenberg Bible—one of only five complete copies in the United States—the world’s first photograph, Shakespeare’s first folio; manuscripts by Walt Whitman, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Blake, Arthur Miller, Charlotte Bronte, Jack Kerouc, America’s first published African-American woman poet, Phyllis Wheatley; paintings by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Steiglitz, and Lewis Hine; reproductions of the dresses worn by Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, and the storyboard for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Historical documents such as Napoleon’s “Order of the Legion of Order,” the document written by the King of Spain appointing Hernan Cortes Captain General of “New Spain,” and a letter written by George Washington at the end of the American Revolution will be included. Scientific manuscripts by Copernicus, Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and a map of the moon by Italian astronomer Cassini drawn in 1679, will be on display. In addition, eclectic and unusual items such as a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, the blue moccasins of D.H. Lawrence, childhood drawings of Toulouse-Lautrec, Sicilian marionettes, Harry Houdini promotional posters, the sunglasses Gloria Swanson wore in Sunset Boulevard, and Marlon Brando’s little black book will be on view. This is a mere sampling of the Center’s treasures that will be on view at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. Remember, the Museum has free parking on the eastside of the building along Red River Street.
- Sheree Scarborough
