The Harry Ransom Center
Decider finally gets around to every local institution, one at a time
It holds the sound (and the images, and the words, and the costumes…): The Harry Ransom Center
More than a schmaltzy piece of clichéd dreck with Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, and Sean Hayes, the "bucket list" is a catalog of things we all vow to do someday, maybe, or at least when friends from out of town stop by to crash on our air mattresses. Ever aware of our own mortality, Decider gets the jump on death and vows to check out every “you’ve never seen ____?!” in town to determine whether it was worth the wait or worth dying having not experienced it at all. In this inaugural outing: Associate editor Erik Adams checks in with the cultural artifacts of the Harry Ransom Center.
Depending on how geeky your social circle is, you either regard the University Of Texas' Harry Ransom Center as the home to a world of untold cultural riches, or that ugly slab of international-style limestone across the street from the Dobie Center. I clearly fall in the former category. As I run with a crowd that released an audible "ooh" when we found out that, among its 36 million manuscript pages, 1 million rare books, 5 million photographs, and 100,000 works of art, the Ransom Center also boasts examples of correspondence between Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. I'd often imagined of losing an entire afternoon to the center's suppressed first edition of Alice In Wonderland or Jack Kerouac's On The Road notebook, but was never able to make the time to do so until this past Sunday.
Unfortunately, I found out too late that even humanities researchers (and the Ransom Center employees who work the stacks) take days off, so the reading rooms that provide access to the archived portions of the collection are closed on Sundays. The spacious (if not a touch-too-gray) gallery in the center's lobby, however, is open every day but Monday, giving visitors many more hours to view two of the center's most prized acquisitions—a Gutenberg Bible and "the first photograph," Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's "View From The Window At Le Gras."
Purchased in 1978 to memorialize the center's namesake (Ransom died in 1976), the Gutenberg Bible is one of 48 surviving copies of the Western world's first mass-produced book. This 42-line version may not be as rare as the 36-line Gutenberg Bible held by the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, but it's still been afforded some fancy digs: The two calfskin-bound volumes sit in a glass display case within a circular enclosure separating the exhibit from the rest of the gallery. Like the Ransom Center itself, your interest in the Gutenberg Bible will vary depending on your interest in history, rare books, and the printing process, but even the most fidgety kid dragged here by their parents has to acknowledge the power of the artifact that brought literacy to the masses (or roll their eyes and shrug the exhibit off before sending a text message to their friend, thereby indirectly proving my point). My fellow typography nerds (Papyrus is the worst, am I right?) should enjoy the large-scale reproductions of Gutenberg's movable type adorning the exhibit's enclosure, even if they were used to produce words in a language no one can read any more.
The Gutenberg Bible and "View From The Window At Le Gras" are linked by interactive supplements, which were partially out of order during my visit. The screen that lets visitors leaf through a digital version of the Bible's Book Of Genesis was blank, which, combined with Year One's mediocre opening box-office draw, made it a bad weekend overall for the Judeo-Christian take on mankind's early days. Thankfully, the "View From The Window At Le Gras" portion was working, because without it, it would have been hard to distinguish much of anything while looking at the pewter plate on which Niépce captured the image of two wings and the sloping roof of his family home. Niépce's photograph (or, if he had it his way, "heliograph") was overexposed from the start, but time has only served to blur the image further. Like the Gutenberg Bible, "View From The Window At Le Gras" has its own special enclosure, built to not only stave off further fading, but to provide the proper light in which the image can be viewed. It took a while, but by viewing the photograph at an angle—similar to the one shown in the Ransom Center's web exhibit—I was able to make out the roof, as well as the shape of a distant tree.
But "View From The Window At Le Gras" is an achievement of technique, not aesthetics. And while the Ransom Center has made big strides in recent years to establish itself as a place to look at beautiful things—like the stunning photography of Fritz Henle, on display in the gallery through Aug. 2—as well as scrutinize, contextualize, and file those beautiful things away as part of the greater history of beautiful things. The Ransom Center is learning to appeal to the aesthetes, but it's the geeks who are filling those reading rooms—provided they go on the right day.
See it before you die? Definitely. Go on a day the reading rooms are open, make a quick pit stop to see the Gutenberg Bible and the first photograph, then head upstairs and start making ridiculous requests of the clerks. You want to see an annotated draft of Batman? Film of Mike Wallace interviewing Eleanor Roosevelt? Some D.H. Lawrence manuscripts? They've got it.
