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In 2008, John Fowles’s widow shipped to the Ransom Center 90 boxes of the writer’s manuscripts, books, and personal effects to be added to the author’s extensive papers, the bulk of which were acquired in 1991. Among the items received was Fowles’s writing desk, complete with its contents. On March 31, 2011—Fowles’s 85th birthday—the desk will be placed on display in the Ransom Center’s Reading and Viewing Room, where it will remain for at least the next two years. It joins the desks of Edgar Allan Poe and Compton MacKenzie, which have been on display since the room opened to researchers in 2003. Fowles’s desk will be displayed with drawers open to reveal a selection of its fascinating contents.

As an undergraduate intern at the Ransom Center, I was given the opportunity to sort through the desk and its contents in preparation for their display. The two-drawer desk is spartan and well-loved, its surface marred by cigarette burns, its left drawer marked with addresses and phone numbers in Fowles’s hand. The contents range from dried seeds and paleontology slides to a pair of brass knuckles. After spending an afternoon sifting through the desk’s contents, I was hooked. Who was this man who kept a pair of brass knuckles next to his slides of Ammonite-Spinokosmoceras?

Unfamiliar with Fowles’s work, I looked to The Magus for an introduction and saw echoes of Fowles’s desk and its contents throughout the novel. A handful of Greek coins in the left drawer recalled the novel’s setting on a Greek island, while one especially suspenseful scene in the first half of the novel reminded me of a mysterious, single black and gold die. As I became acquainted with Fowles’s other novels, I saw reflections of his writing in further items from his desk; among other things, the typewriter ribbon canisters stamped “Lyme Regis” recalled The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

The contents of John Fowles’s desk, then, are at once material and literary. The Center’s John Fowles papers are rich with research opportunities, but the desk provides us with something more: a glimpse into the physical objects from the writer’s life that, at times, seem to coincide with moments from his many novels.

Some of the contents of the desk are mysterious and intriguing, and others, like the staples and empty eyeglass cases, are simply the vestiges of any ordinary man’s life. The entire contents of the desk are listed below. I’m still unsure as to whether or not any of Fowles’s novels can explain the brass knuckles, but I’ll keep reading in hopes of finding some clue.

The complete contents of John Fowles’s desk:

Two scraps of paper with appointment times, addresses, calculations, names, notes
Two invitations to “A Tribute to John Fowles, Patron of Town Mill” in Lyme Regis, Saturday 13 December 2003, 6–8 p.m.
Annotated photocopied pages from Fowles’s diary
Two copies of The Mail on Sunday, November 19, 2000, which includes an article written by Fowles about the planned development of the harbor in Lyme Regis
Newspaper clippings announcing the publication of Fowles’s book Lyme Worthies
Copy of an undated newspaper clipping regarding the publication of The Magus
Newspaper clipping, first of a two-part biographical article on Fowles
Two packs of printed self-adhesive address labels for Belmont House in Lyme Regis
Set of blue labels with white string ties
Envelope of photographs inscribed “Photos of Belmont, Lyme Regis, England, 1995”
Five eyeglass cases
Four pairs of eyeglasses
Prescription card from optometrist Guy Hayden
Fourteen typewriter ribbon canisters of various brands (six empty, three unopened, three containing dried seeds, and two containing used cartridges)
Small plastic bag with scrap of paper inscribed “JASPER”
Plant tag inscribed “EUPATORIUM LIGUSTRINUM”
Two paleontology slides from the Yorkshire Museum
Plastic bag of small reddish-white pebbles, stapled closed
Two blending pencils
Three colored pencils
Tin of pastels
Four pens (two fountain, one ballpoint, one felt-tip)
Five fountain-pen cartridges
Two small pencil sharpeners
Two boxes of staples
Loose staples
Two rubber bands
Three binder clips
Two six-inch plastic rulers
Blank notepad, white
Inkpad, black
Bottle of Liquid Paper
Box with Super Glue inside
Four sheets of round, multicolored stickers
Two packs of blank self-adhesive labels, white
Box of self-adhesive company seals, maroon
Paper fan
Seven coins (one Swedish, six Greek)
Small book of holiday gift tags
Pocket knife, Richards Sheffield brand
Medical scissors
Calculator operating manual, Ibico model 122S
Magnifying glass pouch, Magnabrite brand
Three wooden boxes of varying sizes and sources, containing rubber bands and gramophone needles
Descriptive leaflet for a “Handmade Scrimshaw” item
Case for Swatch brand Irony watch
Leather dice shaker
Two carved wooden letter openers
Two pipes
Brass knuckles
Sheet of paper (one side is bright yellow, the other is shiny gold)
Misprinted black die with gold dots
Two stones
Unidentified leaf
Key
Three pieces of unidentified hardware, plastic and metal
Broken decorative piece, painted gold
Green twist tie
A single, white Tic-Tac candy

A plaster maquette of a bust of W. E. B. DuBois has been donated to the Harry Ransom Center. The bust, which was sculpted by Walker Hancock (1901–1998), documents a step in the creative process for the final marble sculpture, which resides in Memorial Hall at Harvard University.

A plaster maquette is a model for a finished sculpture that enables the artist to visualize and test shapes and ideas before producing a full-scale sculpture. (It’s analogous to a cartoon or sketch for a painter.)

The DuBois bust was commissioned in 1993 by the Harvard University president and fellows and the Department of Afro-American studies. DuBois was the co-founder of…

Dr. Jana Funke, Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, U.K., visited the Ransom Center on a Hobby Family Foundation Fellowship in July and August 2010 to work on Radclyffe Hall’s short fiction. She is using the material she gathered for a monograph exploring the relationship between modernist sexualities and time. She is also preparing a critical edition of Hall’s unpublished works.

Radclyffe Hall is best known for her infamous novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), with its bleak depiction of female sexual inversion—a sexological term that combines traits we might nowadays classify as lesbian and transgender. It might therefore come as a surprise that spending several weeks in the archive working…

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

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The Harry Ransom Center owns a collection of materials related to magician Harry Houdini, whose 137th birthday is today. The above slideshow highlights some examples of materials in the collection.

Parts of the Houdini (1874-1926) collection pertain to the numerous magicians with whom Houdini cultivated personal relationships, but the focus of this collection is the life and career of Houdini himself. Manuscript material in the collection includes Houdini’s correspondence with magicians and writers; letters to his wife Bess, 1890s–1926; manuscript notes and revisions for A Magician among the Spirits (1924), along with Houdini’s annotated printed copy; and the correspondence of A. M. Wilson, editor of The Sphinx, 1905–1923. Houdini’s films are represented by the script for The Master Mystery (1918), news clippings and a press kit for The Man from Beyond (1922), and publicity photographs. His interest in spiritualism is documented by a newspaper clipping file on spiritualism, manuscript notebooks on spiritualism and theater, and history of magic scrapbooks, 1837–1910.

Actress Elizabeth Taylor, who died today at the age of 79, has connections to the Ransom Center holdings, ranging from the Mel Gussow collection to the Ernest Lehman collection.

The former New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow, who died in 2005, wrote Elizabeth Taylor’s obituary. His obituary, with updated contributions from other reporters, was posthumously published today in the New York Times.

The Lehman collection, consisting of more than 2500 items, spans the forty year career of the screenwriter, novelist, short story writer, journalist, motion picture producer and director. Included in the collection are scripts, correspondence, photographs and other material from the production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of…

Today it seems, with iPads and hybrid cars and 3-D blockbusters, technology advancements are, quite literally, right in our faces. Almost jaded by the constant onslaught, we expect constant development and easily adapt, rarely finding ourselves bewildered by new devices. This, however, was not always so.

American author Russell Banks’s 1989 novel Affliction, which in early drafts he titled “Dead of Winter,” was his first attempt to construct a work of fiction on a word processor. Used to typewriters or even plain pencil and paper, the word processor, with its editing capabilities such as formatting or spell check, offered a completely new experience.

In a page of typed notes…

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Among the material in the Ransom Center’s current exhibition, Becoming Tennessee Williams, is a picture of Tennessee Williams holding a photograph of Elia Kazan. Kazan was an American film and theater director, producer, screenwriter, and co-founder of the influential Actors Studio. In his theatrical career, Kazan became one of the most visible members of the New York elite, directing highly acclaimed plays by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Thornton Wilder, among others. As a film director, he won two Academy Awards for best director and elicited award-winning performances from such actors as Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, and James Dean.

Kazan is infamous for the testimony he gave to the House Un- American Activities Committee…

Stella Adler was considered one of this country’s most important teachers of the principles of acting, character analysis, and script analysis. Adler began acting when she was just four years old, alongside her parents, Jacob and Sara Adler, in a production of the Yiddish play Broken Hearts by Z. Libin. Adler performed throughout her youth and young adult years in the New York Yiddish Theater, in which her parents were active. She later became associated with the Group Theatre through Harold Clurman, whom she married in 1943.

In 1934 Adler studied with Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavsky, who would remain an important influence on her throughout…