Harry Ransom Center
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The Harry Ransom Center is an archive, library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the collection of literary and cultural artifacts from the United States and Europe for the purpose of advancing the study of the arts and humanities. The Ransom Center houses 36 million literary manuscripts, 1 million rare books, 5 million photographs, and more than 100,000 works of art. The Center has a reading room for scholars and galleries which display rotating exhibitions of works and objects from the collections.
Contents |
Notable possessions
The two most prominent possessions in the Ransom Center's collections are a Gutenberg Bible (one of only 21 complete copies known to exist) and Nicéphore Niépce's 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.
Beyond these, the Center houses many culturally important documents and artifacts. Particular strengths include modern literature, performing arts, and photography. Some notable holdings include:
Literature
- Three copies of the First Folio of William Shakespeare's plays
- A suppressed first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, one of only 23 copies known to exist
- The personal libraries of writers such as Ezra Pound, Evelyn Waugh, Alice Corbin Henderson, and the Coleridge family
- Extensive manuscript collections of Lewis Carroll, Doris Lessing, Aleister Crowley, James Joyce, T. E. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence, T.H. White, Carson McCullers, Norman Mailer, Anne Sexton, Don DeLillo, Graham Greene, Brian Moore and David Foster Wallace
- Edgar Allan Poe's writing desk
- A large collection of rare and valuable comic books
- A writing journal kept by Jack Kerouac in preparation for writing On the Road
- The Cardigan manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
- The rare original first edition of Liber Al (among other original Crowley First Editions), also known as the Vellum books but more popularly known as the Holy Book of Thelema by Aleister Crowley
- Tarot Cards hand colored by Aleister Crowley
History
- A 16th century globe designed by Gerardus Mercator
- Kraus Map Collection, a 16th and 17th century cartographic collection
- An official declaration by Napoleon Bonaparte
- The love letters of the Mexican Emperor Maximilian I and his wife Carlotta
- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's notes, interviews, manuscripts, and other documents relating to the Watergate scandal
- The first permanent photograph still in existence — original plate of Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras
Theatre and film
- The papers of Stella Adler, Robert De Niro, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, David O. Selznick, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Gloria Swanson, Tennessee Williams, Harry Houdini and Spalding Gray
- Selected costumes, script drafts, storyboards, and audition tapes from Gone with the Wind. These are part of the David O. Selznick Collection
- Unused props designed by Salvador Dalí to have been used in the dream sequence in Spellbound
- The sunglasses worn by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard
Art
- Two paintings by Frida Kahlo: Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird and Still Life (with Parrot and Fruit)
- A complete set of Picasso's Vollard Suite
- A she-wolf statue carved in stone and coated with gold leaf (now worn off) by Eric Gill, creator of Gill Sans
- Busts of various writers (on display in the lobby and reading room)
- Large holdings in art by writers and portraits of literary figures
- Facsimile of the piano suite Gaspard de la nuit composed by Maurice Ravel
