Print of Franz Liszt, 1841.

Long before Beatlemania, mid-nineteenth-century European audiences went wild for Franz Liszt, the Hungarian pianist/composer with shoulder-length hair. Women fought over his broken piano strings and collected his coffee dregs in glass vials. One woman retrieved Liszt’s discarded cigar stump from a gutter and encased it in a diamond-studded locket monogrammed “F.L.” To describe this phenomenon, German poet Heinrich Heine coined the term “Lisztomania.”

Liszt took the classical music world by storm. Considered the best pianist of all time by his contemporaries, Liszt essentially created the piano recital. He was the first pianist to emerge onstage from the wings, he introduced the custom of performing in profile because he didn’t want the piano to block his face, and…

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.

Musician Graham Reynolds plays an interlude during the program “Censorship,” presented by the Harry Ransom Center in conjunction with the Dionysium. Photo by Pete Smith.

Visitors at the Dionysium event enjoy a night of lecture, debate, theatrical presentation, and music. Photo by Pete Smith.

Isaiah Sheffer of Selected Shorts reads selections from some notorious banned books. Photo by Pete Smith.

Sam Tanenhaus, Editor of The New York Times Book Review, spoke informally with Ransom Center staff about the future of publishing. Photo by Pete Smith.

…

Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried.'

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is an account of soldiers’ experiences during and after the Vietnam War. Like his other National Book Award-winning work, Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried offers readers a glimpse of war that neither glorifies nor camouflages its realities. O’Brien himself has said he is only attempting to tell a “true war story.” Because of O’Brien’s frank depiction of war and strong use of language, The Things They Carried has been challenged and banned by some counties and schools.  In connection with the Ransom Center’s exhibition Burned, Banned, Seized, and Censored, visitors are invited to see the exhibition during Veteran’s Day weekend, Friday, November 11 through Sunday, November 13, and receive a…

Paul Schrader's outline for the 1980 film 'Raging Bull.'

Leger Grindon is a professor of film and media culture at Middlebury College where he has taught since 1987.  He is the author of Knockout:  the Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema (University Press of Mississippi, 2011), Hollywood Romantic Comedy:  Conventions, History and Controversies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and Shadows on the Past:  Studies in the Historical Fiction Film (Temple University Press, 1994).  Grindon spent time working in the Robert De Niro collection in July on a Robert De Niro Fellowship.  He is preparing an essay, “Filming the Fights in Raging Bull,” for a forthcoming critical anthology on the films of Martin Scorsese edited by Aaron Baker and to be published by Wiley-Blackwell.

The object of my research was the…

Snapshot photo of Audrey Wood, Tennessee Williams, and Carson McCullers. Undated. Unidentified photographer.

Milly S. Barranger, Dean at the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and Distinguished Professor Emerita at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, visited the Ransom Center in July on a fellowship funded by the Fleur Cowles Endowment to study the Audrey Wood papers for her upcoming book Audrey Wood and the Playwrights: Shaping American Theatre and Film in the Last Century. The book will be her fourth on pioneering women in the American theater in the mid-twentieth century. Below, she shares her experience working in the collections.

The Hazel H. Ransom Reading Room at the Ransom Center is a treasure of interstitial resources on American theater…

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.

Associate Curator of Art Peter Mears discusses Frida Kahlo's Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird. Photo by Pete Smith.

Richard Williams, an independent scholar researching the Erle Stanley Gardner collection at the Ransom Center, discusses his work at the fellows’ brown bag luncheon. Photo by Pete Smith.

Elana Estrin interviews undergraduate student Sonia Desai about her work at the Ransom Center. Photo by Kelsey McKinney.

Len Downie, Vice President at Large of The Washington Post, reviews a document in the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate papers during his…

Continue Reading Photo Friday

Click on the four-way arrow in the bottom right-hand corner of the slideshow to convert into full-screen mode.

The Ransom Center recently acquired ten tintype images from photographer Robb Kendrick. Tintype printing is a historical photo technique that was used primarily during the nineteenth century. The tintypes acquired are each handmade and one-of-a-kind.

The acquired tintypes vary in subject matter from portraits to landscapes to cacti. Several of Kendrick’s photographs were taken on location for National Geographic, and many were taken for personal projects.  Kendrick’s most recent wet-plate work documented the working cowboy for the December 2007 issue of National Geographic. The photographs were taken in 14 western states, Mexico, and Canada.  These photographs were then collected in the critically acclaimed book Revealing Character.

Kendrick’s documentary photography regularly appears in National Geographic, but he also frequently works with wet-plate photography. Kendrick currently splits time between Austin and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with his wife and two sons.

Robb Kendrick. "Untitled: Raramuri Series." March 2008.

An envelope sent from the bookshop to Christopher Morley in 1921.

Frank Shay’s shop at 4 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village was a bookstore, a community gathering place, a circulating library, and a tiny publishing house all at once. Shay published a newspaper, a magazine, and more than a dozen books from the shop during his time there: small, handcrafted editions with a simple, charming aesthetic that may also reflect the tastes of Shay’s wife, the artist and designer Fern Forrester Shay. In 1924 Frank Shay sold the bookshop and moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he had already been spending summers with his traveling bookshop. The 4 Christopher Street location closed down just a year later. We know that the shop…

Arthur Conan Doyle's Ouija board. Photo by Pete Smith.

Bethany Johnsen is an undergraduate intern at the Ransom Center who has been working with Cline Curator of Literature Molly Schwartzburg to gather materials for students for a visit on Halloween.

For the students in University of Texas at Austin English Professor Janine Barchas’s freshman honors seminar, a Ransom Center visit on October 31 will bring more than the usual bag of treats: a Halloween-themed presentation introducing students to the Center’s resources.

I assisted Ransom Center Cline Curator of Literature Molly Schwartzburg in putting together the presentation, and this process revealed the provocative connections that such a subject affords, and will, we hope, suggest to these students ways they might use the collections over…

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.

Reading room page and undergraduate student Melissa Herman pages materials from the stacks. Photo by Pete Smith.

Chris Jones, a volunteer in the conservation department, works on the binding for ‘El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers.’ Photo by Pete Smith.

Conservation department volunteer Margaret Schafer works on repairing paper tears to an album belonging to Joseph Hergesheimer, an early 20th century novelist. Photo by Pete Smith.