A Library Unlocks Its Attic

No disrespect is intended to your local public library. But to glimpse 36 million of the most coveted pages in all of literature, and possibly also Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s underwear, serious book folk know they must come here, to the same Hill Country that gave this nation Lyndon B. Johnson, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and its largest public university.

Once arrived, they look for the tall glass-and-concrete box at the edge of the University of Texas campus, and step into the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, home to a staggering trove of papers and artifacts from thousands of writers, artists, musicians, actors and others.

Down these corridors, elaborately indexed, preserved and arranged, is the smoking-gun evidence that James Joyce liberally amended the final page proofs of “Ulysses,” that William Blake hand-colored some copies of his 1789 “Songs of Innocence,” that D.H. Lawrence toyed with many titles before naming his novel about Lady Chatterley. In late July, 37 boxes of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate papers arrived.

For decades, scholars have rummaged here in solitude and wonder, sorting through a collection laid out something like a bottom desk drawer eight stories deep. But now, for the first time in its improbable 46-year history, the center has a clean, well-lighted place to show off its massive holdings for a wider audience. And as an increasing number of libraries nationwide begin to behave more like museums, this Austin building may stand as a hint of things to come.

In May, the institution unveiled a $14.5-million renovation that includes tall new windows, abundant natural light and 40,000 square feet for an exhibition area, theater and second-floor reading room. Attendance, previously around 180 visitors per week, now hovers around 1,200 -- and that’s with most of the university’s 52,000 students on summer vacation.

“It’s wide open. We’re in a conversation now with the public,” says Associate Curator Peter Mears.

Every research library has its own philosophy, from those whose musty reading rooms admit only credentialed scholars to the less exclusive (and often publicly funded) facilities that welcome anyone curious and well-behaved. But throughout the discipline, librarians have been brushing up their displays or thinking about it.

The Morgan Library in New York, long a pioneer in literary exhibitions, closed in May for an ambitious three-year, $100-million expansion project that will further enlarge the institution’s exhibition spaces, reading room and auditorium. The Boston Atheneum reopened in September after a three-year, $30-million renovation that moved its exhibition space from upstairs to a prime spot on the ground floor.

These days, says Atheneum director and librarian Richard Wendorf, “you have to provide a broader public with a better sense of what you’re collecting and why you’re doing it.”

At the Huntington Library in San Marino, researchers still need credentials, but librarians have welcomed all comers to broadly pitched exhibitions that since the early 1990s have included Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and the California Gold Rush.

“The museum world has a great deal to teach the library world about how to show their rare and unique holdings. Libraries have been needing to make some strides in that area, and they’re beginning to do so,” says Victoria Steele, head of special collections for UCLA’s Charles E. Young Research Library.

The Getty Research Institute’s director, Thomas Crow, suggests a pair of factors that might lie behind this trend: First, there’s the growing number of artists and museums showing works that involve arrangements of found objects, thereby widening the audience’s idea of what to expect in a museum setting. Next, there’s the galloping advance of the computer as a prime tool for storing and transmitting information, a development that “makes you more aware of the physical nature of the object” when you look at a book, manuscript or document.

At any institution that acquires large collections, part of the fun is finding surprises, as the Ransom Center’s staffers did more than 30 years ago, when the underwear arrived along with a dealer’s collection of materials from Doyle, who created detective Sherlock Holmes in 1887. Living authors, too, have been known to lose track of exactly what they’ve handed over.

Terrence McNally, the prize-winning, Texas-bred playwright whose works include the book for the musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” says he was thrilled when the Ransom Center asked for his papers several years ago, “since my apartment was overflowing with old manuscripts.” But he can’t explain the unopened roll of wallpaper that’s filed there in Austin under his name.

In an archive with 36 million manuscript pages, 1 million rare books, 5 million photographs and more than 100,000 works of art and design, these things happen.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Desk

“This is Edgar Allan Poe’s desk,” says librarian Richard Oram, leading a first-timer past an antique in the reading room. “And Mr. Greene there” -- a nod toward an unsmiling man at a table -- “is working on Edith Sitwell.”

Back in the stacks, arranged in numbered acid-free boxes, lie letters to and from Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess, manuscripts from T.S. Eliot, John Fowles, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, editions of Shakespeare from the 17th century, and the storyboards from “Gone With the Wind.” Here’s the paint box of e.e. cummings, who daubed portraits between poems; the moccasins worn by D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico; Tom Stoppard’s expired passport from 1967.

Here’s a note in pencil from the legendary saxophone player Charlie Parker, written during his involuntary stay as a patient at Camarillo State Hospital in 1946. “Dear Ross,” Parker writes, addressing a friend. “Please come right down here and get me out of this joint. I’m about to blow my top.” Parker, a chronic drinker and drug addict who struggled with depression, was released the following month, but died in 1955 at age 34.

Here’s Graham Greene, vacillating from draft to draft over where to use present or past tense in a passage about the Mexican border. Here are Lewis Carroll’s family photos.

Harry Huntt Ransom, the silver-tongued English professor-turned-administrator who founded the center in 1957, began with the singular idea of creating “a Bibliotheque nationale” of Texas. Knowing that older libraries had already gobbled up most of the best work by authors before 1870, he aimed instead to collect more recent writers, and to look beyond their published work to less-scrutinized drafts, doodles and occasionally even desks, pens, spectacles and cigarette lighters.

He got the rest of the world’s attention in 1958, when he put up $1.1 million of the university’s money to buy most of Pennsylvania industrialist and collector T. E. Hanley’s library, an avalanche of private papers from Joyce, Shaw, Lawrence, Thomas, Samuel Beckett and Walt Whitman.

And as Ransom’s clout grew and contacts multiplied, the University of Texas was growing too, thanks in part to royalties from oil and gas extraction on 2 million acres of university-owned land in West Texas. Ransom was so often secretive about money that even now, estimates of total state spending on acquisitions under his leadership range from $11 million to $55 million. But all sides agree that while his career took him beyond the world of books to the university’s top job, he steered enough funding toward the humanities center to bankroll a 15-year buying spree.

In that time, the center evolved into a many-headed beast, with portraits by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo on one floor, and 5,000 boxes of papers from movie producer David O. Selznick on another.

Ransom “could not tell the difference between the actual, the possible, and the totally inconceivable,” his former colleague John Silber, now chancellor of Boston University, later told the Austin American-Statesman. “He was, therefore, a man who could imagine new possibilities.”

John O. Kirkpatrick, the center’s senior curator of modern British literature, remembers how, 35 years ago, “back at the loading dock, the trucks used to back up two or three times a week with these great masses of papers. Britain’s patrimony.”

By the time Ransom resigned as university chancellor in 1971 -- amid criticism of his free spending, spotty record-keeping and preoccupation with manuscript-hunting -- the center had a growing reputation, especially in England, as a well-paying haven for half-forgotten papers, often bringing welcome paychecks to living authors.

Ransom died in 1976 and the center was renamed for him six years later. More than four decades after his buying began, critics and bibliophiles in London are still skirmishing over whom to blame. Writing in the London-based Guardian on May 5, columnist John Sutherland called the process “archival hemorrhage.... We shamelessly let America do our cultural duty for us, then resent the Yanks for doing it.”

Moreover, the Yanks aren’t done doing it.

Hands Across the Water

“I’m always talking to England,” says Thomas Staley, who took over as director of the Ransom Center in 1988.

Staley, 67, who made his name as a Joyce scholar in Oklahoma before his arrival in Texas, says the director’s job requires a degree of spycraft -- knowing, for instance, the current state of relations between British authors A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble (sisters, with a history of acrimony). To keep the center’s name out of negotiations, he frequently makes his purchases through a New York dealer. And if word is passed that a certain writer might be in a pinch to pay off tax debts or dental bills, well, that’s useful information.

“We’re not buying for retail value. We’re buying for research value,” Staley notes. “My standard is: Tell me after 10 years how much usage it’s had.”

By that standard, the Ransom collection’s greatest hits include Jack Kerouac’s spiral notebook, some letters from J.D. Salinger, the corrected typescript of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel (“V,” acquired in 2001), as well as manuscripts from Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Anne Sexton.

The Ransom Center spends roughly $600,000 yearly on acquisitions, about one-third its rate in the good old days. Although exceptions like the Watergate papers crop up from time to time, “our funds are finite,” Staley says. “There are limits. Even in Texas.”

Still, outsiders rank the center’s ability to add to its collections alongside such competitors as the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Whose papers have gotten away? For one, those of Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize, who lives in South Africa but whose papers now reside in Indiana University’s Lilly Library. The problem, says Staley, was that “I put it too much in the hands of an agent. I was too passive. It’s never been repeated.”

Back in the bowels of the center, conservators in one room carefully restitch 17th century bindings, while other staffers catalog computer discs from living writers. Staffers work steadily to assess and organize collections, but because the institution has amassed so much material in such broad variety in so few decades, curators say they’re sure to be sitting on some valuable scholarly surprises.

In the film department, a batch of old acetate-based footage, deterioration awaiting remedy, sends up a scent of vinegar. In the Gloria Swanson files, a curator pulls out her marked-up script from “Sunset Boulevard” in 1950. Instead of waiting for “the close-up,” Swanson’s handwritten notes show, she (or somebody) changed the line to say, “I’m ready for my close-up.”

Last year’s additions included British novelist Julian Barnes’ archives, along with a the 1958 script for a musical co-written by a then-unpublished novelist named Thomas Pynchon. (The musical, never produced, imagines the world in 1998, dominated by IBM.) In April came the Watergate papers purchase, paid for by $5 million in private gifts.

The idea behind all such acquisitions, says Kirkpatrick, the literature curator, is to lay bare the creative process, “to show the development of the text from the first ideas of the writer. The first edition is boring. The more drafts, the better.”

Moments in Time

The center’s D.H. Lawrence files, for instance, show the novelist’s three false starts in trying to title that book about Lady Chatterley: “Tenderness,” “My Lady’s Keeper,” and “John Thomas and Lady Jane.”

In the Tennessee Williams files, the playwright first chose “The Gentleman Caller” or “Portrait of a Girl in a Glass,” before he switched to “The Glass Menagerie.”

Yet for three decades until this spring, the center was housed in a concrete bunker of a building, its ground floor taken up by another arm of the university, its own displays mostly limited to a modest hallway in another building. “You could put hundreds of hours into a show, and nobody would see it,” says Oram, the librarian.

“You almost had to know what you wanted before you came into the building,” concedes Staley.

These days, the entrance to Ransom’s public galleries is dominated by a pair of artifacts that staffers have been known to call “the vestal virgins.” One is a complete Gutenberg Bible, one of five in the U.S. The other is a faint image of a French farm landscape on a pewter plate -- an 1826 image that many believe is the world’s first photograph from nature.

Nearby, in a curatorial bow to local cultural history, the villain Leatherface’s mask from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” -- shot in and around Austin in the early 1970s -- stares out from a glass display case. Other displays highlight playwrights, who have become a priority in recent years, with arrivals including Stoppard, McNally, Arnold Wesker, David Hare, Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Staley is too cagey to say exactly whom he’s negotiating with at the moment. But a list of likely suspects is easy enough to find. The literature curators keep a sort of “A-team” list of writers whose first editions the center buys. As of May 30, it included 550 post-1950 living writers in English, some chosen strictly for literary merit; others, including many detective and mystery writers, selected for what their work reveals about regional contemporary culture. (Carl Hiaasen and Tony Hillerman are on the list; John Grisham and Stephen King are not.)

From those chosen 550, curators zero in on archive-acquisition targets and set priorities. He’d love to land the novelist Don DeLillo, Staley says, and when Southern California-based novelist T.C. Boyle’s name comes up, the director is suddenly full of questions: Where does Boyle live? Where does he teach? Anything else?

Later, informed that Boyle’s archive is uncommitted and the author has said “it would be mighty nice to have my papers safe and secure someplace,” Staley does not hesitate.

“God, that’s great,” he says. “I’ll follow up.” Within four hours, he’s sending e-mails from his vacation cabin in Maine.

Harry Ransom may have left the building, and the public may have entered, but bibliomania is bibliomania and the game hasn’t gotten any simpler.

“It’s chess,” says Staley, “not checkers.”

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An eclectic collection

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas recently opened its massive holdings to a wider audience. Below are a few of the treasures in its trove:

Los Angeles Times