The ransom center

Lisa TurveyThe Ransom Center was founded in 1957 as a repository for rare books and manuscripts, and its holdings now include 1 million rare books, 42 million manuscripts, and a huge photography collection. How have your collecting practices evolved?

Megan BarnardIn many ways this goes back to the origins of the Ransom Center and to Harry Ransom, an English professor at the University of Texas, who advanced to become the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and then the vice president and provost and president and chancellor. In 1956, shortly before the Ransom Center officially became the institution that it now is, he described his vision for establishing what he called “a center of cultural compass.” Ransom believed that very strong library collections were the foundation for a university, and he initially focused that collecting primarily on literary manuscripts and rare books. But he was deeply interested in the creative process, the trail the author leaves behind that shows how works were generated—the notes, the evolving drafts, false starts, correspondence, all of the various supplementary materials that tell the story of how a creative work came to be. And so the Ransom Center began collecting full archives at that time. That wasn’t a common practice yet, although it has certainly become quite common. Ransom’s idea for establishing a “cultural compass” led, still in the early history of the Center, to the idea that the institution should look more broadly at culture, so the Ransom Center began collecting in other areas, such as art and photography and film. A lot of the early collecting in those areas was due to strong connections with the Center’s literary archives. These cross-disciplinary connections are a real hallmark of the Ransom Center’s collecting.

We have a collection-development policy now that guides our collecting decisions, and it’s publicly available on our website. Among the guiding principles of that policy is the idea that we collect materials that document the creative process of individuals or organizations working in literature, the arts, and the humanities, and that foster connections among the Ransom Center’s collections.

Stephen EnnissThere was also a Texas theme to Ransom’s original vision; he was mindful of the strong research collections on the East Coast and West Coast and wanted to create a similar resource in the center of the country. But because those East and West Coast institutions had such a long head start and had already amassed huge collections of rare books, Ransom understood that the University of Texas was not going to catch up. The pivot to the papers of writers was innovative at the time, in the 1950s and ’60s. But it was also partly driven by the recognition that the institution could immediately and in very short order establish a collection of great distinction, unrivaled by any collection anywhere else. It was partly that understanding that drove this pivot to manuscripts and archives, and it was a particularly fortuitous time to do that. Some US institutions had manuscript collections, but abroad, collectors of contemporary authors lagged far, far behind their American counterparts. One bookseller memorably told me that in the UK an author had to be “securely dead” before the British Library would be interested in his or her papers. Ransom recognized an opportunity early in living authors’ papers and in creating a unique and distinctive resource that we’ve now sustained for more than sixty-five years.

LTYour holdings are so wide-ranging; highlights include one of twenty copies of the Gutenberg Bible, [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein’s Watergate papers, Ezra Pound’s copy of [T. S. Eliot’s] The Waste Land [1922], and David O. Selznick’s archive. But the collection also coalesces around distinct nodes. How do you conceptualize those interdisciplinary components?

SEWe’d love to think that it all makes perfect sense. And there is a rationale; it’s articulated in a collection-development policy and we try to steer close to it. There are opportunistic things that occur, so some of the collections you named have unique circumstances that led to their being here. But in terms of the nodes, one of the things we’re consistently looking for when materials are offered to the Ransom Center is the interconnection between the collection on offer and the collections already here. A very rich research environment is created as those interconnections proliferate. It’s very common for researchers to come to the Ransom Center thinking they want to consult one archive and then finding themselves needing much more time to spread outward into all these interconnected areas. In the early years, the Ransom Center collected in a more encyclopedic fashion and more broadly than the fields we’re best-known for today. As the collection has matured, as the institution has matured, we’ve recognized the strength of these patterns and connections.

MBOftentimes creative figures represented in our collections collaborated with one another, or influenced or corresponded with one another. As one example, Gabriel García Márquez, whose papers are here, was heavily influenced by William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce, and the Ransom Center has strong collections related to all those writers. Looking across disciplines—I’m thinking of our performing-arts collections—we have very strong archives related to playwrights. But then we also have many archives of actors, scenic designers or costume designers, critics, and photographers who have all worked in the field, and their archives can tell different parts of the story of the production of a particular play. Having these connections offers unique opportunities for researchers and students to approach their research questions from a wide range of angles.

SEOver the history of the institution, there have been cultural shifts that have changed the nature of collecting. When Ransom began collecting and established the Center, there was an emphasis on literary culture, and there still is. But the Center began collecting film very, very early. And we know today, of course, that a lot of creativity that might in another time have been expressed in the novel or the short story has moved to film and screenplays.

A similar thing occurred in our photography collections. The origin of the Center’s photography holdings was a historical nineteenth-century photography collection; a few decades ago the emphasis shifted to the archives of prominent photojournalists who were documenting wars and conflicts of the twentieth century. But what’s occurred over this span of time is a shift in the very nature of photography and its recognition as a fine art.

LT“Gone to Texas” is shorthand for your acquisition of an archive. What’s your sense of the Ransom Center—which is not only an archive but also a museum and a library—vis-à-vis other institutions? Are there peer institutions with whom you collaborate or compete?

SEThat’s a big question. We do have peers. We’re all engaged in trying to identify, preserve, and make accessible the most important and significant cultural products of our time, and that’s not an activity that any one institution can completely or successfully do, so it’s very much a collective enterprise. Close peers of ours are institutions like Yale’s Beinecke Library. But many other major universities have very fine special collections, and we collaborate with our peers on a very regular basis and enjoy good relationships with them.

On the question of competition, there’s a type of collection that’s so desirable, any institution would want to acquire it. So there certainly is desire, and maybe you could express that as competition. But it unfolds in an unusual way. Often, the creator, writer, or their family or agent has already determined where they think that archive belongs. In the case of Gabriel García Márquez, we simply received a phone call one day from a representative of his family asking if the Harry Ransom Center would be interested in acquiring his papers. Of course the answer was yes, but many other institutions that had gotten that call would have answered yes. It’s our responsibility then to make it happen, but the competition has been discreet and silent and often occurs before the offer is made. Once that offer is extended, there’s a good-faith negotiation between the seller and the buyer to try to reach a common understanding. It’s unusual, and some would say even irregular, for someone to invite multiple parties to try to buy the same collection simultaneously, and we have chosen not to engage on collections presented that way.

MBBuilding on the idea of collaboration, we’re offered materials every single day, and often those collections or items would fit well at the Ransom Center. Sometimes, though, we aren’t the right place for them. So a part of what we do, and many of our colleagues at other institutions do, is try to direct materials to the appropriate place. If we’re offered materials, for example, that relate to a particular creative figure and we’re not the repository of record for that person’s archive, it’s much better for researchers if everything resides together, so we will often recommend that the person reach out to the institution that does have that figure’s archive. And we have been the recipients of references like that as well. There’s a real collaborative spirit among our colleagues throughout the field, and a sense of commitment to the idea of trying to do the best that we can to preserve our cultural heritage.

There’s collaboration in other ways too. We regularly collaborate with peer institutions, whether they’re library archival institutions or museums, by loaning materials for exhibitions; we have an active loan program. We also often collaborate on grant-funded projects, various initiatives, and digitization projects. For example, we recently partnered with Swansea University on an extensive digitization project for Dylan Thomas’s archive.

LTYou mentioned the advantage for researchers when all elements of an archive reside together rather than being dispersed among different institutions. Is the general preference to acquire the entirety of a given cultural figure’s archive?

SEThere’s been a change within the profession over the decades. In the ’50s, ’60s, and into the ’70s, maybe later, it was common practice for archives to be widely scattered, and the idea of a complete archive wasn’t as firmly established. More recently, institutions have recognized how beneficial it is for researchers to work in an archive that at least aspires to completeness, so when we acquire an archive, even of a relatively young figure—I’m thinking of the British novelist Rachel Cusk, who was in her fifties when we acquired her papers—we expect that we will continue to acquire her papers as she goes on to write works that haven’t even been conceived at present. We’re really making an open-ended and ongoing commitment to the individual writer and would be advocates for the profession to recognize that principle and give deference to the institution that has established a source archive that they’re committed to building.

What can disrupt that is if someone perceives the market as something that they can leverage for financial gain. Some sellers may perceive competition as a way to drive up price, so while we’re committed to that principle of trying to keep an archive together, we won’t be held hostage by that principle and will do our best negotiating in good faith to achieve a fair market price for the seller and hope to keep that collection intact. It’s not a view that’s universally held.

MBThere are also sometimes circumstances where there are challenges to keeping archives together, particular circumstances that just prevent it from being possible. Another situation that’s a bit different is a photographer’s archive: there can be multiple prints of the same photograph and it doesn’t necessarily make sense for all of those to reside in one place. It can be quite important and helpful for those materials to have a broader reach and to be represented in collections at museums that are dispersed geographically. The same can be true for artworks; it doesn’t always make the best sense to have everything in one place. But when you’re looking at archival materials that tell the story of the creative process, that’s the type of material that really is very helpful to keep in one place if possible.

LTWhen acquiring an archive, how completist are you? Is the tendency to acquire everything with a connection to the creation of the work and the creative process, or do certain materials not make the cut?

MBWe really try to think about what material has the best use for research purposes, for teaching, for influencing research and learning. We try to focus on those materials that relate directly to the creative work, but a person can take a very expansive view of that, right? We don’t need every pen or pencil that someone used. We try to be very comprehensive but we can’t collect everything. The types of materials that we rarely collect will be things like personal effects—maybe the desks or furnishings that someone used, or the various objects that they surrounded themselves with. We try as a guiding principle to think about what would be of most use for research for years to come. Sometimes that can be a little hard to predict, because trends in research do change, but that’s really what we’re trying to keep in mind as we make those decisions and as we talk with creative figures about their materials.

SEOne of the first things we do is enter into a conversation that’s very much oriented around defining what the archive is. We’ve actually approached writers and expressed an interest in their archive only to be told, Oh, I don’t have an archive. But do they have a closet or an attic? All kinds of materials end up being relevant for research and teaching purposes. At the end of the day, what the archive becomes is defined during that process of discussing what we’re interested in, but also what the individual is comfortable including in a public academic institution. And most archives have a kind of silent history of erasure that sometimes comes to light: materials that are perhaps too personally revealing that the individual can’t comfortably part with. The history of this kind of collecting is filled with absences and destruction of materials. We’re always advocating for the preservation of as much of that record as we can possibly collect, but competing forces come into play around this question of just what the archive contains and what it is.

 LTI imagine it’s impossible to generalize, but can you give a sense of the timeline from initial discussion to acquisition to processing to public accessibility? And has digitization helped that process or made it more involved?

SEWhat has to be present is trust between buyer and seller. It’s a very intimate thing to take the type of material we’re talking about from someone who’s had a successful career, as a writer for example, and may still have a lengthy career ahead of them. It’s a very significant step they’re taking. So a trust relationship is key. And sometimes the assurances of a third-party agent can help provide those reassurances. Sometimes it’s months or even years of direct communication with the author. It’s highly variable how long it might take. I was recently, I thought, in a rather advanced stage of discussion with a writer, a Booker Prize–winning novelist, about his papers, and at the eleventh hour, he said he wasn’t ready. Which is fine, because he must be ready and we have the luxury of being able to wait, because we’re in this for the long, long term. But it can be a lengthy process to work through the many issues attached with the transfer of such personal material.

MBAs for digitization, it offers all sorts of opportunities, particularly for the researcher. It can make it much easier to share collection materials with remote researchers who aren’t able to travel to our reading room. We digitize and make available online thousands of collection items every year. Our peer institutions do as well. What we have found, and general trends in the field seem to indicate, is that as digital facsimiles of original collection materials become more widely available online, researcher interest in seeing the original also seems to remain very strong, or in many cases even increases. I think that’s different from what people may have expected—that as you create new opportunities for access through digitization, it creates stronger interest not only for those digital facsimiles but also for the originals.

SEAnother part of your question was about the timeline of processing a collection and making it available. We have a very good record of cataloguing collections in a short time and of making them accessible. All institutions of the kind we’re talking about have backlogs, us included, but one of the things that an individual contemplating placing an archive would be well-advised to think about is the institution’s reputation for fulfilling their obligations and cataloguing a collection properly—perhaps digitizing portions of it if that’s agreeable to the copyright holder—how robust are they and what is their capacity to fulfill the institutional commitment that’s being made. A couple of examples might be helpful. It was 1961 when Arthur Miller’s archive was first acquired, and it was 2016 or 2017 when we acquired the remainder of it. We work on that notion of completeness over decades sometimes. The Anne Sexton papers originally came many, many years ago, and we’re in the process of making a significant addition to that archive. The commitment that the Ransom Center is making is really an open-ended and enduring one, and part of what we have to offer a creator is that ongoing service to their legacy that spans beyond their lifetime and ours as well.

LTFor those readers who have archives that they may wish to donate or sell in the future, what steps should they take now to make that process smoother? What materials should they be saving?

MBProbably the place to start is for someone to be thinking about their goals for their archive and its future accessibility. Any institution will need to gain an understanding of what the archive is, what materials are available, and there may need to be some discussion about what’s best suited for a particular institution. Another thing to think about is whether materials would be offered as a donation or for sale. It’s important to recognize that even a donation requires a substantial long-term investment from an institution, so any acquisition at all, whether it’s a donation or a purchase, is a commitment from the institution in perpetuity that requires very significant investments of time and various resources.

It can also be helpful for a person to think about what materials they are actively making use of on a regular basis as part of their creative process. That might be material they need to retain, at least while it’s still useful to them. It’s really helpful, too, as conversations start with an institution, to build a relationship with that institution, visit the institution, get a good understanding of how materials are made accessible, what the mission and the commitment of that institution are. Acquisition should not be the end of a relationship; it’s just the beginning.

SEI’m glad you made those points, and I would echo one of them: the institution that one chooses to approach about the acquisition and then care of one’s archive in perpetuity is making a very significant commitment of time and resource to that figure’s legacy. That institutional validation that someone’s work is going to be studied in future decades, long after the figure is gone, is a very significant thing, as is the open-ended commitment to serve that legacy for years. And it’s more valuable than gold.