Harry Ransom Center | |
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30°17′04″N97°44′28″W / 30.28444°N 97.74111°W | |
Location | Austin, Texas, U.S., US |
Type | Academic library |
Established | 1957 |
Other information | |
Affiliation | University of Texas at Austin |
Website | www |
The Harry Ransom Center, known as the Humanities Research Center until 1983, is an archive, library, and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the collection of literary and cultural artifacts from the Americas and Europe for the purpose of advancing the study of the arts and humanities. The Ransom Center houses 36 million literary manuscripts, one million rare books, five million photographs, and more than 100,000 works of art. [1]
The center has a reading room for scholars and galleries which display rotating exhibitions of works and objects from the collections. In the 2015–16 academic year, the center hosted nearly 6,000 research visits resulting in the publication of over 145 books. [2]
Harry Ransom founded the Humanities Research Center in 1957 with the ambition of expanding the rare books and manuscript holdings of the University of Texas. He acquired the Edward Alexander Parsons Collection, [3] the T. Edward Hanley Collection, [4] and the Norman Bel Geddes Collection. [5] [6]
Ransom was only the official director of the center from 1958 to 1961, but he directed and presided over a period of great expansion in the collections until his resignation in 1971 as chancellor of the University of Texas System. The center moved into its current building in 1972.
F. Warren Roberts was the official director from 1961 to 1976. He acquired the Helmut Gernsheim collection of photographs and the archives of authors D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, and Evelyn Waugh, and in 1968 the Carlton Lake Collection. [7]
After Roberts's tenure, John Payne and then Carlton Lake served as interim directors from 1976 to 1980. In 1978, the center acquired its complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible.
In 1980, the center hired Decherd Turner as director. Turner acquired the Giorgio Uzielli Collection of Aldine editions, [8] the Anne Sexton archive, the Robert Lee Wolff Collection of 19th-century fiction, the Pforzheimer Collection, [9] the David O. Selznick archive, the Gloria Swanson archive, and the Ernest Lehman Collection. [10] Upon Decherd Turner's retirement in 1988, Thomas F. Staley became director of the center. [11]
Staley acquired the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers, [12] a copy of the Plantin Polyglot Bible, and more than 100 literary archives.
In September 2013, Stephen Enniss, former head librarian of the Folger Shakespeare Library, was appointed director of the Ransom Center. [13] Under Enniss, the Ransom Center continued to collect archives, including those of Kazuo Ishiguro [14] Arthur Miller [15] and Ian McEwan. [16]
In 1983, the institution's name was changed from the Humanities Research Center to the Harry Ransom Center. [17]
Two prominent items in the Ransom Center's collections are a Gutenberg Bible, [18] [19] one of only 21 complete copies known to exist, and Nicéphore Niépce's c. 1826 View from the Window at Le Gras , the first successful permanent photograph from nature. Both of these objects are on permanent display in the main lobby.
The center also houses many culturally important documents and artifacts. Particular strengths include modern literature, performing arts, [20] and photography. [21] Besides the Gutenberg Bible and the photograph, notable holdings include:
Extensive manuscript collections of George Atherton Aitken, Julia Alvarez, Julian Barnes, Marthe Bibesco, Elizabeth Bowen, T. C. Boyle, Lewis Carroll, J. M. Coetzee, Billy Collins, Aleister Crowley, Don DeLillo, Gabriel García Márquez, Erle Stanley Gardner, Graham Greene, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Norman Mailer, Carson McCullers, Ian McEwan, McSweeney's, Brian Moore, Anne Sexton, David Foster Wallace, and T.H. White
Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam, and his work later in life often explores the postwar lives of its veterans.
The Gutenberg Bible, also known as the 42-line Bible, the Mazarin Bible or the B42, was the earliest major book printed in Europe using mass-produced metal movable type. It marked the start of the "Gutenberg Revolution" and the age of printed books in the West. The book is valued and revered for its high aesthetic and artistic qualities and its historical significance.
Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels". A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."
Norman Bel Geddes was an American theatrical and industrial designer, described in 2012 by the New York Times as "a brilliant craftsman and draftsman, a master of style, the 20th century’s Leonardo da Vinci." As a young designer, Bel Geddes brought an innovative and energized perspective to the Broadway stage and New York’s Metropolitan Opera. In the 1930s he became one of the first to hold the title of Industrial Designer. His futuristic Streamline designs re-envisioned many of the utilitarian objects of the day from airliners and cruise ships to cocktail shakers and circuses. He also conceived and oversaw construction of the Futurama Exhibition at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
Curtis Hidden Page was a United States educator and writer.
Henry Seidel Canby was a critic, editor, and Yale University professor.
Carlton Munro Lake was an American literary critic, book collector, and library administrator. He is most notable for having accumulated the Carlton Lake Collection of research materials in French literature, which he donated to the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Lake was the director and executive curator of the Harry Ransom Center from 1978 to 2003. The Carlton Lake Collection is widely considered to be the best collection of research materials in French literature outside of France.
William Winter was an American dramatic critic and author, born in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1857, then chose literature as his field of endeavor, and moved to New York City (1859), where he became literary critic of the Saturday Press, then (1861–65) of the New York Albion, and for more than 40 years (1865–1909) was a drama critic of the New York Tribune.
Aleister Crowley was an English writer, not only on the topic of Thelema and magick, but also on philosophy, politics, and culture. He was a published poet and playwright and left behind many personal letters and daily journal entries. Most of Crowley's published works entered the public domain in 2018.
The Vision and the Voice is a book by Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). It chronicles the mystical journey of the author as he explored the 30 Enochian aethyrs originally developed by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 16th century. These visions took place at two times: in 1900 during his stay in Mexico, and later in 1909 in Algeria in the company of poet Victor Benjamin Neuburg. Of all his works, Crowley considered this book to be second in importance behind The Book of the Law, the text that established his religious and philosophical system of Thelema in 1904. It was first published in 1911 in The Equinox as a "Special Supplement".
The Yale University Library is the library system of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Originating in 1701 with the gift of several dozen books to a new “Collegiate School," the library's collection now contains approximately 14.9 million volumes housed in fifteen university buildings and is the third-largest academic library system in North America and the second-largest housed on a singular campus.
Marcia Nardi (1901–1990), born Lillian Massell in Boston, Massachusetts, was an American poet.
Harry Huntt Ransom was a faculty member and administrator at the University of Texas, becoming the university's president in 1960, and ultimately served as the chancellor of the University of Texas System from 1961 to 1971.
Harold Wayne Billings was an American librarian, editor and author best known for his role in developing national and state library networking and resource sharing among libraries.
Jessie Belle Rittenhouse Scollard, daughter of John Edward and Mary (MacArthur) Rittenhouse, was a literary critic, compiler of anthologies, and poet.
Thomas James Wise was a bibliophile and probable literary forger and thief who collected the Ashley Library, now housed by the British Library.
Decherd H. Turner was an American bibliophile, ordained Presbyterian minister, director of S.M.U.'s Bridwell Library, and director of U.T.'s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, known for acquiring rare books, manuscripts, and other archival materials.
Airliner Number 4 was a design by Norman Bel Geddes and Otto A. Koller for a 9-deck amphibious passenger aircraft intended to replace the large transatlantic liners that traveled between Europe and North America before the Second World War. It was never built.
The Streamlined Ocean Liner was a design by Norman Bel Geddes for a streamlined steam-powered ocean liner. The shape was compared by Pathé to that of a porpoise, blunt at the front and tapered at the rear. It first appeared in Geddes' 1932 book Horizons and an outline patent was filed in 1933 with a detailed patent following in 1934. An offer was made for the rights to the design in the late 1930s, which Geddes refused. He still hoped to sell it to an American shipbuilder, but the ship was never built.
The Sunwise Turn, A Modern Bookshop was a bookshop in New York City that served as a literary salon and gathering-place for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alfred Kreymborg, Maxwell Bodenheim, Peggy Guggenheim, Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Harold Loeb, John Dos Passos and others. It was founded by Madge Jenison and Mary Horgan Mowbray-Clarke in 1916, and operated until 1927. As such, it is one of the first bookshops in America to be owned and operated by women. Its papers — those of its founders and of the bookshop itself — are held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.