King's Ransom
Here's one thing that's already great about UT: At the Humanities Research Center, you can see some of the most extraordinary cultural artifacts of all time. All you have to do is ask.
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Staley's ultimate legacy, though, will be the HRC's heightened public profile. Its anonymity has been partly the fault of its location, or lack thereof; when Ransom started the collection, it had no home. Then, when the HRC's current building was built, during the student uprisings of the early seventies, it looked like a bunker. "Oh, they wanted to keep people out," said Staley. "We didn't want any riots in here." But six years ago Staley and the university embarked on a drive that raised $26 million to bolster the HRC's endowment and give the facility a makeover. The resulting renovation, executed by San Antonio's Lake/ Flato architecture firm, is striking. The front facade is now windows, with images from the collections—photographs, drawings, signatures—and pieces of text etched into the glass. Inside, for the first time ever, the HRC has space to exhibit its own materials. Staley has also beefed up the HRC's Web presence, putting its catalog online, along with a virtual tour of the Gutenberg Bible. "There's a possibility here for a mecca of culture," said Staley. "And this used to be a quiet place."
It remains quiet in the new reading room, which is where the real magic happens anyway, even for someone who walks through the stacks every day. "Oh, those Ulysses page proofs are a special place for me," Staley said. "And Graham Greene's collection. He did a series of postcards in which he wrote a story on the back of each one for his grandchildren. And there's a letter Faulkner wrote to his parents from Connecticut, with a passage describing a ship that he's watching, afloat on Long Island Sound. And he's talking to his folks about it, and all of a sudden, my God, there, for the first time, is his writer's voice."
And there also, in a moment, is what makes the HRC a special place. One writer, one idea. You might call it inspiration.
Due to copyright restrictions, we are unable to publish the photos for this article on our website. To see the pictures from the Harry Ransom Center, purchase the October issue of Texas Monthly on newsstands now.
BOB WOODWARD'S WATERGATE TYPEWRITER
Woodward says he was called in to the Washington Post on Saturday June 17, 1972, and asked to cover the Watergate break-in because he was too new at the job to complain. These are the notes he took in the city-desk editor's office that morning. They represent the exact moment the pencil hit the pad on the biggest story in the history of American journalism.
GEORGE GERSWIN SELF-CARICATURE
Drawn on the back of a restaurant table card, this self-caricature is thought to have been made by Gershwin over dinner with Gloria Swanson, as it was found among Swanson's personal papers after the hopeless pack rat donated her huge, 500,000-page archive to the HRC. The music at the top of the drawing is the opening bar to Rhapsody in Blue.
THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH
The HRC says the exact date of the photo is 1826, but "1827" is inscribed on the back of the original frame, in which it still rests. What is certain is that it is the world's first photograph. It was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce from the upstairs window of his family estate in central France using an eight-hour exposure on a pewter plate coated with bitumen.
WILLIAM FAULKNER'S BURNED POETRY MANUSCRIPTS
Among the HRC's 137 Faulkner manuscripts are the handwritten final draft of Absalom, Absalom!, hand-illustrated books he wrote in his twenties, and 287 sheets of poetry burned in a 1942 fire at the garage of his mentor. This poem, written in 1925, was initially titled "If Cats Could Fly" but was later changed to "A Child Looks From His Window."
RUSSELL LEE'S CAMERA
When Lee donated this camera to the HRC, he called it his "workhorse." It was his primary camera when he shot for Roy Stryker's Farm Security Administration photography project between 1936 and 1942, documenting the Great Depression with the likes of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, both of whose photographs are also at the HRC.
DANTE'S THE DIVINE COMEDY
These handwritten pages were completed in 1363, 42 years after Dante's death and 90 years before the introduction of movable type to the world. These pages were written entirely by hand, as were the comments in the margins, which were made by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century scholars and teachers working on this early version of the book.
POSTCARD FROM PICASSO TO JEAN COCTEAU
On the back of this postcard from L'Hôtel Continental on the French Riviera is Picasso's watercolor impression of his view from the room he stayed in with his first wife in 1919. The HRC has other pieces of Picasso's correspondence, as well as a magnum of the 1953 champagne that was served at his second wedding, in 1961.
ERNEST LEHMAN'S SCRIPT TREATMENT FOR NORTH BY NORTHWEST
These notes were produced by screenwriter Lehman after a brainstorming session with director Alfred Hitchcock, in which the two finally solved the problem of getting Cary Grant out of the field in the film's famous crop-duster scene. Lehman, now 88 and living in Los Angeles, continues to donate items to the HRC.
LEWIS CARROLL SELF PORTRAIT
Carroll is considered one of the earliest amateur photographers. The HRC owns eleven of his negatives (this one was taken in 1872) and five full albums of photographs he took of Victorian-era luminaries, family, and friends and several loose prints, including a portrait of Alice Liddell, the subject of his most famous work, Alice in Wonderland.
ALEISTER CROWLEY'S TAROT CARD
John Kirkpatrick, the HRC's eminently dignified manuscripts curator, says that when black-clad, purple-haired researchers enter the reading room, the staff knows they want to see materials from early-twentieth-century occultist Aleister Crowley before they even ask. Crowley bought these tarot cards in 1906, nearly forty years before designing his own set.
E.E. CUMMINGS' PAINT BOX
The majority of Cummings' manuscripts at the HRC date to the American poet's childhood, including a large trove of poems written between 1902 and 1914, before he turned twenty years old. But he originally wanted to be an artist, and the HRC also has some three hundred of his works, ranging from pencil sketches to watercolors of landscapes.
NAPOLEON'S DEATH MASK
Two days after the exiled French emperor died, in 1821, his doctor, Francesco Antommarchi, made a plaster cast of his face. This mask is thought to be one of several hundred copies Antommarchi made after he moved to New Orleans in 1834. Longtime theater-arts curator Frederick J. Hunter gave it to the HRC in 1971.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE'S READING GLASSES
The HRC has many personal effects belonging to the Scotland-born creator of Sherlock Holmes, including his desk, the clothes he was wearing when he escaped his burning house in 1929, his Ouija board, and the dirty socks his wife took off of him after he died so she could make him more presentable for the afterlife.
SAMUEL BECKETT'S HANDWRITTEN MANUSCRIPT FOR WATT
As fascinating as Beckett's daydreaming and doodling on the left-hand pages can be, the wonder of this draft of his 1953 novel is that it's in English. The Irish playwright wrote it in the early forties, when he was posing as a Frenchman to help the Resistance in Provence. Had the Nazis seen it, his cover would have been blown.
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER'S TYPEWRITER
Singer worried throughout his long career that Yiddish was a dying language, so he wrote in it frequently, often on this Yiddish-keyed typewriter that he said had magic literary powers. The HRC also has his 1978 Nobel prize medal, notes on more than four thousand stories, novels, and plays, and other unpublished and untranslated writings.
GEORGE WASHINGTON'S HAIR
One of the HRC's stranger items is a book of famous people's hair collected in the nineteenth century by British man of letters Leigh Hunt. Not much is known about how the book was compiled, but the names of said famous people are plenty familiar: Napoléon, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among others.
FRIDA KAHLO'S DIEGO Y YO
Mexico's most famous twentieth-century artist produced this sketch during a 1930 stay in San Francisco with her husband, Diego Rivera. If you look closely at her stomach, you can see where the famously childless Kahlo, who aborted a fetus that year, has erased an image of a baby with Rivera's face.
NORMAN BEL GEDDES' STREAMLINED MOTOR CAR #9
Designer Bel Geddes created this foot-and-a-half-long prototype for the cars in his sprawling "Futurama, City of Tomorrow" exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair. The vast Bel Geddes Collection, acquired between 1958 and 2000, provides numerous examples of his famous "streamlining" techniques as applied to everything from cars to toasters.
LETTER FROM F. SCOTT FITZGERALD TO BLANCHE KNOPF
This 1928 letter from Fitzgerald to Knopf, the co-founder of the Knopf publishing house, has the author of The Great Gatsby conjugating the verb "to cocktail." It shows up in her correspondence files in the HRC's Knopf Collection with a copy of her response, which begins, "Dear Scotch, I think the conditional is the best and the one to be followed . . ."
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