UT's historic collection

James Howard Gibbons:

Suppose there were a place where any Texan or visitor could go to examine and marvel at:

• Charlotte Bronte's microscopic handwriting in the manuscript for her work of juvenilia, The Green Dragon.

• The green dress Vivien Leigh wore as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, the bomber jacket Robert Deniro wore as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and the dress Betty Davis wore in Mildred Pierce.

• Anne Sexton's typewriter, Evelyn Waugh's ink well and pens, George Bernard Shaw's letter opener and D.H. Lawrence's moccasins.

• A Gutenberg and a Coverdale Bible (the first printed in English, in 1535.)

• The world's first photograph, and photographs from throughout the medium's history.

• The Watergate papers of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

• The archives of Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Gloria Swanson, James Jones, Nancy Cunard, Julian Barnes and many more.

• Wonderful paintings and drawings by Henry Miller, William Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, Lafcadio Hearn and James Thurber.

• Manuscripts by T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), John Fowles and Tennessee Williams.

• Whole rooms of furniture and other possessions that once belonged to J. Frank Dobie, Earle Stanley Gardner and John Foster Dulles.

• The letters of Graham Greene.

• The libraries of James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh and Ezra Pound.

That place exists on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. It is the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, a place where the staff is so erudite even the guards and cleaning staff have developed specialties in 20th century art and literature.

If the Smithsonian is the nation's attic, the Ransom Center is its study. It houses so many collections of British writers' papers it has been accused of stealing Britons' heritage.

...

On a counter in another room I spotted Norman Mailer's well-worn address book from the late '60s, early '70s. In it I saw a telephone number I had dialed many times: my late father's office number when he was a public affairs officer at the space center during Project Apollo.

...

Harry Ransom was in charge of the University of Texas when I was an undergraduate student there in the mid '60's. He had a passion for collecting rare items for the library that expanded as you can see from Gibbon's list of a few items. At the time, UT had the second largest endowment of any university in America. Much of it came from oil wells in the Permian Basin of west Texas which went into the Permanent University Fund. The University was only permitted to spend the interest and dividend income on the invested proceeds.