Good Lit. Departments?

JWT86
Sat, 04 Aug 2007 01:30:07 +0000

more on UT’s Ransom Center:

“There’s a good deal of awe at the speed at which the Ransom has been able to build such extensive collections by the dint of a lot of energy and a good deal of money,” said Jean Ashton, director of the rare books and manuscript library at Columbia University. “We admire it and are more than a little bit jealous.”

“Unquestionably, it’s the second best collection of English literature after the British Library,” Ferdinand Mount, editor of London’s Times Literary Supplement, said during a recent visit to the Ransom Center.

The rapid influx of cultural resources, which matched or bettered such collections at Harvard and Yale universities in comparable material, was dubbed “instant ivy” by journalist Nicholas Basbanes in his 1995 book about bibliomania, “A Gentle Madness.” “Before anybody realized what we were doing, we built a library that cannot be matched anywhere,” former center Director Warren Roberts told Basbanes.

In 1970, Anthony Hobson’s book “Great Libraries” shocked the bibliophile world by ranking the center with 32 of the world’s greatest archival institutions.

http://www.statesman.com/specialreports/content/specialreports/ransom/17mainransom.html

Increasingly, Princeton curators have found themselves standing glumly on the sidelines. “Because we don’t have a lot of money, dealers don’t even bother to come,” says Primer.

Horowitz confirms that. He did not call Princeton about the Mailer papers. Why bother? He knew that Princeton almost certainly would not match the kind of money he could expect to get from the Ransom Center. Horowitz believes it’s a simple difference of priorities. “At Texas,” he says, “they have identified the pursuit of literary scholarship through original manuscripts as a way of being in the world. Princeton, for whatever reason, does not seem to share this sentiment.”

Make no mistake: Staley is near the top of many a dealer’s speed dial. Not only does the Ransom Center have extremely deep pockets, its money has enabled Staley to build a superb collection, cared for by 100 curators and extensive conservation laboratories.

The Ransom’s awesome holdings, which for some time have exerted something like a gravitational pull on other contemporary authors, make it more likely that in the future other writers will want to be part of this amazing collection. This makes perfect sense: Who wants to be a library’s lone big writer when you might be in the thick of things?

The Ransom Center, which was founded in 1957, has pockets as deep as Texas is big, with much of it coming from oil.

It has paid off. Not only does the Ransom possess treasures like a Gutenberg Bible (there is one in Scheide’s collection at Firestone) and the first photograph, it competes in countless other fields, driving up prices for all. “Our strongest area is probably in the British [writers],” says Staley, sounding positively jovial. “We have Julian Barnes, we have Penelope Lively, Penelope Fitzgerald. Tom Stoppard’s papers are here. So are David Hare’s. The Booker nominations came out yesterday, and three of the nominees are already in our archive.”

And it’s not just literary properties that make the Ransom such a juggernaut: In 2003 the center paid $5 million for the Watergate papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. There’s no ignoring the Ransom’s influence on the market. That $5 million price tag has upped the ante for political papers. “There are now political figures who are approaching me about paying for their papers,” says Primer. “One called recently — I can’t say who it is — who believes his papers are worth $1 million.”