Texas’ Ransom Center boasts treasure trove of works

? The collection is as big as it is diverse.

Five million photographs, including the first one ever. One million rare books, including one of the most important ever printed and the first printed in English. Thirty-six million manuscripts.

A million photographs, about 60,000 works of art and hundreds of reels of movie film pass the years tucked in boxes and placed on the shelves of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.

A writer’s golf clubs. Marlon Brando’s little black book are there.

So are works by Johann Gutenberg, Dante and Walt Whitman. Woodward and Bernstein, Jack Kerouac, Frida Kahlo, Ernest Hemingway and thousands of other writers, artists and actors, are all represented through collections of their works and personal odds and ends — valued at about $1 billion.

Established in 1957, Harry Huntt Ransom, the university’s vice president and provost, wanted the center that bears his name to be “a center of cultural compass.”

Today, it is recognized as one of the world’s top cultural archives, a treasure trove of works tucked deep in the heart of Texas.

Collecting culture

Collecting culture is the mission. From the pop art of Andy Warhol to the works that revolutionized Western civilization, such as the Gutenberg Bible.

MARY FIELER, an electrical engineering major at the University of Texas, passes by the Ransom Humanities Research Center on Texas' campus in Austin, Texas. The center opened a new gallery and reading room after a 4.5 million renovation.

The collection dates back to 1897, when Swante Palm, a Swedish book collector and immigrant to Austin, gave the university 10,000 volumes from his personal library. In 1918, the university started collecting rare books. It purchased some 6,000 first and rare editions of 17th- and 18th-century British and American authors from Chicago businessman John Henry Wrenn.

It was Ransom, a former English professor who became chancellor of the University of Texas System, who established the Humanities Research Center in 1957 and guided it through its most prolific period of growth. His mission was threefold: to buy entire collections, acquire the works of both major and minor authors and collect manuscripts as well as books.

By 1968, the center had 2 million volumes as it expanded to include photography and ventured to collect a broader range of the humanities, such as theater, motion pictures and the performing arts.

While scholars have long recognized the center’s importance, the Ransom Center’s goal this year has been to “unveil” its massive collection to the public.

Housed in a building on the edge of campus that looked more like a concrete fortress than a museum, the center this year opened a new gallery and reading room after a $14.5 million renovation intended to better showcase its holdings.

Designed by the LakeFlato architecture firm of San Antonio, the project took two years to complete. While previous displays of Ransom Center collections fought for space in a cramped area at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum and other buildings on campus, visitors today have about 40,000 square feet in which to browse.

The new gallery features 25-foot-tall windows near the entrance, decorated with intricate etchings of images from photographs at the center, such as Picasso’s piercing stare and Dorothea Lange’s famous photo of a Depression-era farm woman.

“The new architecture was designed to be open and bring light. Students are starting to come by, which is what we want,” says Thomas Staley, the center’s director. “It’s not an imposing building that says, ‘Everything is on guard in this fortress and you better not come in.’ It’s just the opposite right now.”

Prized possessions

The first items encountered are the center’s prized possessions: a two-volume Gutenberg Bible printed in the 1450s and the world’s first photograph — “View From the Window at le Gras” — created by Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1826.

The photograph was acquired in 1964 as part of a collection assembled by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, who found it stuffed in a trunk that had been misplaced for many years. Purchased in 1978 for $2.4 million, the Gutenberg Bible is worth about $20 million today.

Those are the only two items on permanent display. They stay under the watchful eye of security guards at the door. On the rare occasion the Bible is removed from its glass case, an armed guard remains by its side.

“Those are the vestal virgins at the gate,” Staley says about the legacy of the items. “The printed word democratized literature.”

The new gallery’s first exhibit, “In a New Light,” which ran in September, featured about 300 items representing a cross section of the center’s holdings. It was designed to showcase the center’s range of works from the important — a first edition of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” — to the frivolous — the Leatherface mask from the movie “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

“There is a way,” Staley says, “where high culture and low culture can be wedded.”

Other items included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s golf clubs; a copy of the first book printed in English, the “Historyes of Troye”; and Brando’s lost address book, acquired from the collection of Broadway stage manager Robert Downing, who worked on the production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

“I beg you to return this,” the actor wrote. The finder never did and Ransom Center officials say they don’t believe Brando has ever asked to get it back.

New showcase

The center recently opened a new exhibit titled “Make It New,” a showcase of 20th-century “modernism” which Staley called a “major, major exhibition on a national level.”

Two years in the making, it includes the final galley proofs for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and a copy of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” with extensive notes and criticism from Ezra Pound.

Also on display is Picasso’s “Venus of the Gas” which Ransom Center curators believe to be one of the first examples of “found” art, a term used when routine objects are seen for an inherent artistic value beyond their utilitarian function.

The Picasso piece is the ring off a gas burner mounted on a wooden block. Kurt Heinzelman, executive curator for academic programs, said the piece, with a tube that pierces the ring’s inner circle, resembles the international symbol for a female.

“The idea of our exhibition,” Heinzelman said, “is to show how modernism in the first three decades of the 20th century affected all of the arts.”

The center recently finished a project to post digital images of its Gutenberg Bible on the Internet to give the public and scholars greater access to view its detailed lettering and the margin notes made by Jesuit monks who used the book until the 1760s.

The digital Bible has drawn nearly 10 million hits from Internet users.

“This is probably the most extensively annotated and corrected copy surviving,” said Paul Needham of Princeton University’s Scheide Library. “This is a very great treasure.”

Besides the collection itself, Staley said the center’s staff of archivists make it an easy choice as a repository of important works.

Bob Woodward, an editor at The Washington Post and his former Post colleague Carl Bernstein, this year chose the Ransom Center to catalog and prepare for public release the notes of their Watergate investigation, which won the Pulitzer Prize and led to the downfall of the Nixon administration.

Any documents relating to “Deep Throat,” the anonymous source who helped the reporters break their stories, will remain with Woodward and Bernstein. The materials the center receives will include more than 250 pocket-sized notebooks, memos, story drafts, clippings, movie manuscripts, photographs and memorabilia.