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Tom Staley: The Ransom Center is not merely a library. It's not a museum.
It's a research center, but it's also a great place for students.
We have poetry readings. We have exhibitions. It's a center of learning.
It's an opportunity to see so much of our culture,
the opportunity to look at a first edition of "The Great Gatsby,"
to read manuscripts of James Joyce, to look at poems that John
Milton made changes in, in his own hand.
These are the kind of things that bring you close to a culture.
"The Watergate Papers," it's not a typical kind of
collection that the Ransom Center would collect, but these papers were so much a
part of American history. Woodward and Bernstein wanted them to come here and
for students to have an opportunity to study this material is wonderful.
Charlotte Canning: In "Rehearsing the American Dream, Arthur Miller's Theater"
here at the Harry Ransom Center, we have an extraordinary range of material.
This is a reproduction of a short story Miller wrote in 1932, when he was 17.
Miller forgot about this story and after "Death of a Salesman" opened in 1949,
his mother found it in their house and gave it back to Miller. And, it's very
clear, as you read the story that it is exactly the forerunner to "Death of a Salesman."
Arthur Miller received this letter in 1994 from a man named Majeed
Hameed who was a professor at a university in Basra. The envelope is handmade.
It's two pieces of brown butcher paper held together with small pieces of orange
tape. This was during Operation Desert Storm and Hameed wrote Miller that they
had no food, they had no medicine, their children were starving, but what they
really needed, he said, was books. It was clear that, to Hameed, those books
were as important as food.
David Coleman: The exhibition that we have on view is
called "Dress Up Portrait and Performance in Victorian Photography." Some of the
more dramatic images in this exhibition are these six plates by Guillaume
Duchenne de Boulogne who was a French physician working with electricity. What
Duchenne was trying to do was, basically, map the physiognomy of human emotion.
He felt that people wouldn't be able to act those expressions out naturally, so
he provided some external assistance, I guess you could say. Here we have two
images by a very young Vietnamese American photographer named Binh Danh.
He superimposes the negative on top of the leaf while it's still living, puts it
out under the sun for a few days and makes, what we call, a leafograph, he calls
a chlorophyll print.
There was a real boom in panoramic photography in the '20s.
Here we have the 4th Annual Bathing Girl Review from Galveston, Texas in 1923
and it's an amazing slice of life of the times, of the early '20s.
Richard Oram: The Gutenberg Bible is the single most important rare book in the
Ransom Center collections.
Not all rare books are pretty books. This happens to be the
extremely plain 1st edition of T.S. Eliot's, "Wasteland." It is inscribed by the
author, "To E.P. (Ezra Pound) il miglior fabbro." Which, in Italian means, "the
better craftsman." And, we have the 1st edition, the 1st published version of
William Shakespeare's, "Merchant of Venice" and it was printed in a quarto,
small edition, which is the way plays appeared at this time.
The cartographic holdings extend
from the very first map in a book and incorporate just about
every important early work of cartography.
Steve Wilson: We have somewhere around 10,000 posters.
And, easily over a million film stills, a lot of movies from the drive-in era.
That is a poster for "The Southerner" starring Zachary Scott, who
grew up here, in Austin. This is a lobby card for "Teddy at the Throttle," one
of Gloria Swanson's earliest films. It was a comedy with Bobby Vernon and
Teddy is the dog.
This is a scene conception for "Gone With the Wind" for the Atlanta
bazaar scene. The funny thing about this one is that there's a little menorah
drawn on the table, probably as a joke for David O. Selznick's benefit.
This is the dress that Scarlett wears to Melanie's birthday party.
It's the burgundy ball gown.
Of course, we have prints of most of Selznick's films, "Spellbound,"
"Gone With the Wind" and, we even have a print of "King Kong," but some of the
more interesting things in the Selznick collection are screen tests.
"I have hopes of winning a scholarship."
"I see. They have difficult examinations."
"I've taken mine . . . just today."
"Today? Well, this is a great occasion. What are we drinking this for?
Waiter, bring champagne." "The best vintage and the best brand in your cellar."
These are two costumes from the Robert DeNiro collection.
This red suit is from "The King of Comedy" and next to it was a donation from
Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for "Taxi Driver." We have 64 interviews
that Mike Wallace did in 1957 and '58 with people like Eleanor Roosevelt,
Margaret Sanger and, recently, Mike Wallace gave us permission to put the entire
collection online. Anyone can come into our reading room and request anything in
the film collection. We have screenwriters coming in to see the work of Ernest
Lehmann and Jay Preston Allen. We have students and we have the general public
coming in.
Tom Staley: We try to make these works live on the campus and that's
what happens here. If you can make your collections vital and alive and living
and part of the cultural life of the institution, then you have succeeded, then
you have done something that really enriches the texture of the intellectual
life of an institution. And, that's one of the great purposes of the Ransom Center.