Why the greatest university library is in Texas (UT-Austin)

[JWT86]

<p>

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac’s spiral-bound journals for “On the Road”; and Ezra Pound’s copy of “The Waste Land,” in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: “For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E.” Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of “Comus,” containing corrections in Milton’s own hand? Or the manuscript for “The Green Dwarf,” a story that Charlotte Brontë wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of “Ulysses,” on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center’s archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.
…
The Ransom Center, under Staley’s leadership, easily outmaneuvers rivals such as Yale, Harvard, and the British Library.
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During Staley’s two decades in the job, he has bought nearly a hundred literary collections—including papers of Jorge Luis Borges, John Osborne, Julian Barnes, Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard, Penelope Fitzgerald, John Fowles, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Don DeLillo—and, as he moves toward retirement, his buys are getting bigger. In 2003, Texas bought the Watergate papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for five million dollars. In 2005, Staley paid two and a half million dollars for the collection of Norman Mailer.
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There is not much that other institutions can do when Texas is interested. After Osborne, Stoppard, Penelope Lively, and others sold their papers to Texas, the mass departure aroused alarm in Britain—a 2005 headline in the London Times proclaimed, “WRITERS UNITE TO FIGHT FLIGHT OF LITERARY PAPERS TO U.S.” To counter the Ransom Center, Britain’s national-heritage fund changed a rule prohibiting public money from being spent on material less than twenty years old; the exclusion was reduced to ten years. The change barely diminished the flow of work across the ocean, however. Staley does not have much sympathy for the aggrieved. Last year, at a conference at the British Library, Staley was asked about an essay in which the British poet laureate Andrew Motion argued that national treasures belonged in the nations that created them. He retorted, “Like the Elgin Marbles?”

</p>

<p>from:
Final Destination
Why do the archives of so many great writers end up in Texas?
by D. T. Max, The New Yorker</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/11/070611fa_fact_max[/url]”>Final Destination | The New Yorker;

[world_changer]

<p>Are you defining greatest as best quality, or largest in size?</p>

<p>If the latter, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, and UIUC all have larger libraries…</p>

[JWT86]

<p>Both, actually. Yes, in terms of overall academic library size, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley and UIUC have larger collections. However, in terms of rare book/special collections, UT’s Ransom is actually larger than Harvard’s Houghton and Yale’s Beneicke. It’s quite impressive in terms of size, as well as quality. The article also doesn’t mention UT has another special collection library devoted solely to rare books and manuscripts for all of Latin America (the Benson Collection), which is also the largest library in the world in that regard. It just doesn’t compete in the same areas as the Ransom (i.e., British, French, Italian, and American literary manuscripts.)</p>

[nickdechile]

<p>The Benson Library of Latin America is incredible. The collection is the biggest for Latin American books in the United States. I am a Latin American Studies Student at the University of Texas at Austin and the library is packed.</p>