Cover of "The Legacy of David Foster Wallace."

The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, a collection of essays that examine Wallace, his writing, and his place in literary history, has been published by University of Iowa Press.

Wallace’s archive resides at the Ransom Center.

Molly Schwartzburg, former Cline Curator of Literature at the Ransom Center and current curator at Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, contributed an essay about how Wallace’s manuscripts and personal library were handled and processed after they arrived at the Ransom Center.

Other contributors include Don DeLillo, whose papers reside at the Ransom Center, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and David Lipsky, and Wallace’s Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch. The book was edited…

A small book worm, assisted by a book support, and a large book snake; both assist Io Montecillo, by gently holding open small and large books. Photo by Pete Smith.

Though seldom spoken of, the “book snake” has been a staple for patrons in the Ransom Center’s reading room for many years, while its smaller cousin, the “book worm” has appeared more recently. The story behind these creatures, often seen draped over the sides of books or nestled between the covers, is little known to those not involved in book conservation.

Book snakes and worms, along with book cradles, are used to safely support books and other collection materials while they remain open. The added support of a cradle keeps a book…

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Cultural Compass: Can you tell us about some of your most memorable guests?

Martha Campbell: Oh, heavens!

Martha Campbell, 73, is not your typical B&B owner. During the time she hosted Ransom Center scholars at her home between 1995 and 2010, Campbell helped one renter woo her future husband, competed with a guest in a bake-off, hosted a frequent renter’s book launch, and became a close friend and confidante to many of the scholars who stayed with her.

“When I first started doing this, I thought: ‘How would I feel if I were a stranger in a strange place? How would I want to be treated?’ That’s guided me through the years,” Campbell said.

Campbell quickly became a legend among the Ransom Center scholars, in part for her breakfasts. Vanessa Guignery, past guest and former Ransom Center fellow, reports that Campbell served fruit, juice, muffins, and either waffles, pancakes, or french toast every morning.

“Other scholars stayed with other people who were very nice, but there was no breakfast. So each time I arrived at the Ransom Center and said, ‘Mmm I had waffles for breakfast!’ the other scholars would say, ‘Stop it!’ Everybody wanted to stay with Martha,” Guignery says.

Campbell’s hospitality didn’t stop at breakfast. She invited her guests to dinner parties with her friends and to Austin’s famed live-music concerts. (“I got a kick out of introducing them to Texas music.”)

“It wasn’t just coming back, closing the door, and that’s it. She didn’t make you feel as though you were actually paying to be there. It truly felt like home,” Guignery says.

Campbell’s guests have formed a network, and many of them became close friends and colleagues. During one of Guignery’s stays, Campbell invited two Norman Mailer scholars staying elsewhere, Michael and Donna Lennon, over for a wine and cheese party. Guignery told Michael Lennon about her work on British writer Julian Barnes, whose archive Guignery was researching at the Ransom Center. He suggested that she publish a collection of interviews with Barnes, put her in touch with an editor, and three years later Guignery published Conversations with Julian Barnes. The book now sits on Campbell’s table.

Campbell made her own contributions to her guests’ work. She introduced a few scholars studying spiritualist writers like W. B. Yeats and Arthur Conan Doyle to a spiritualist church down the street. During one of his stays with Campbell, Michael Lennon was invited to read at the Ransom Center’s monthly Poetry on the Plaza event. He asked Campbell if she happened to have any beat poetry around, and he ended up reading from her copy of A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which she bought at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco in 1960.

Built in 1910, exactly 100 years before Campbell hosted her last guest, the home is a registered historical landmark in Austin’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Campbell started housing renters in 1994, soon after her husband passed away.

“I had never had a job. I always thought I couldn’t do anything since I always had my husband,” Campbell says. “Every time I did something like change a light bulb or carry something heavy or fix a toilet, I kept getting more and more self-confidence to live by myself. So I grew as a person along with the house. It really made me a different person. The house is kind of the third big chapter of my life.”

Before hosting Ransom Center scholars, Campbell housed mathematicians and scientists visiting The University of Texas at Austin. Her very first renter was a Japanese man who spoke little English.

“When he left, he looked really forlorn, so I gave him a hug. Then I thought, ‘Am I supposed to do that?’ When I cleaned his room, I found five or six beautiful origami cranes placed around the room. I found out later that was a compliment. He came back once to say hello, so I figured I must’ve done a pretty good job,” Campbell said.

Though she stopped renting in 2010, Campbell periodically hosts informal gatherings for current Ransom Center scholars and staff.

“Somebody said I fall in love with all my guests. I think it’s true. I have a charming man who has breakfast with me, talks to me like what I have to say is important, he stays for a month, then another one comes and takes his place,” Campbell laughs.

Martha Campbell in front of her Hyde Park home. Photo by Alicia Dietrich.

Photo of James Salter by Linda Gervin.

James Salter, whose archive is housed at the Ransom Center, will receive the 2012 PEN/Malamud Award, which honors excellence in the art of the short story.

Salter is the author of more than a dozen books, including novels Light Years (1975), A Sport and a Pastime (1967), The Arm of Flesh (1961), and The Hunters (1957); the memoirs Gods of Tin (2004) and Burning the Days (1997); and the short story collection Dusk and Other Stories (1988), which won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award.

His latest novel, All That Is, will be published in October.

Other Ransom Center authors who have received the PEN/Malamud Award include T. C. Boyle and Andre Dubus.

Salter will be presented the award on December 7. The award was established by the family of Bernard Malamud, whose archive also resides at the Ransom Center.

To…

This copy of the Bible belonged to Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), who carried the book with him during a trip to Constantinople in 1867 while he was writing "Innocents Abroad."

While writing Innocents Abroad, Samuel Clemens (known more familiarly as Mark Twain) carried a Bible during a trip to Constantinople in 1867. The book is now part of the Ransom Center’s collections and can be seen in the exhibition The King James Bible: Its History and Influence, which runs through July 29.

The Bible recently underwent some work in the Ransom Center’s conservation lab. Learn about the steps taken to conserve and house this historical book.

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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of the most enduring classics of children’s literature. Despite consistent opposition, the book has survived countless attacks by critics who sniffed out a labor-friendly agenda, removal from the stacks by well-intentioned children’s librarians, and critiques of both the author (L. Frank Baum) and the illustrator (W. W. Denslow).  Part of its longevity is attributable to the success of the 1939 motion picture classic starring Judy Garland.

L. Frank Baum was a Chicago salesman who turned to children’s literature. He collaborated with the illustrator W. W. Denslow, and they both struck it rich with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, featuring fantasy and child-friendly prose combined with Denslow’s wonderful artistry. The Wizard was the best-selling children’s book of 1900. Writer and illustrator, who were never on particularly close terms, parted ways after this collaboration.

Though The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is Baum’s most revered work, it is not his only creation. The author himself published 13 additional Oz tales illustrated by John R. Neill. Author Ruth Plumly Thompson published 21 supplementary tales set in Oz. Illustrator John R. Neill also wrote and illustrated three of his own Oz books and illustrated more than 40 books about Oz. His black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings are identified almost exclusively with the world of Oz. The last Oz book was published by the firm of Reilly & Lee in 1963.

Most recently, a centennial edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published with scholarly annotations of Baum’s sources and an introduction by Martin Gardner, a Lewis Carroll scholar and student of mathematical games and puzzles.

Last year the Ransom Center received a donation of 16 Oz books from the estate of Douglass Parker.  One of the titles among them, Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, bears Parker’s name and “Christmas, 1939.”  Parker received the book when he was 12.  He went on to become a classics professor and taught at The University of Texas at Austin for 40 years.  In his teaching he discussed “Parageography,” a word he coined to describe the idea that the geography of an imaginary place, like Oz, reflected the creativity of the author.

This donation almost doubles the number of Oz books that are housed at the Ransom Center, representing nearly all of the traditional Oz titles. Many of these are later printings, as described in the Bibliographia Oziana by Hanff, Greene, Martin, Greene, and Haff.

Ransom Center book cataloger Paul Johnson contributed to this article.

"Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz" by Ruth Plumly Thompson. 1939.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Moon on a Hazy Night, ca. 1887, color woodcut, Thomas Cranfill collection; Claude Bragdon, plate 30 from A Primer of Higher Space, 1939; Sir Edward Charles Blount and Gertrude Frances Jerningham Blount, Children motif, ca. 1870, collage of albumen prints, watercolor, pen & pencil in unpublished album, Gernsheim collection; Charlotte Brontë, manuscript of 'The Green Dwarf,' 1833, Brontë Family collection; Southeast Asian white parabaik (accordion book), Eastern Manuscripts collection.

The Ransom Center has awarded more than 50 research fellowships for 2012–2013. The fellowships support research projects in the humanities that require substantial on-site use of the Center’s collections of manuscripts, rare books, photographs, art, film and performing arts materials.

Christopher Grobe, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at…

Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos. Front and back of press print “Nicaragua: 1978” from Magnum Photos collection.

Ileana Selejan, Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, recently spent time in the Magnum Photos collection with a dissertation fellowship from the Ransom Center. Selejan’s work focuses on aesthetics in war photography and protest art at the turn of the 1980s, specifically on the Sandinista revolution, the counter revolutionary war in Nicaragua.

The primary resource I consulted while in residency at the Harry Ransom Center between October and November 2011 was the Magnum Photos collection. I was interested in photographs taken in Nicaragua during the 1978–1979 Sandinista revolution and the subsequent Contra War until circa 1989, and I mainly looked at work…

"The Song of Song Which Is Solomon's" (1902).

Although the focus of The King James Bible: Its History and Influence is on the 400th anniversary of the Bible, the occasion presented an ideal opportunity to display early English Bibles from the Ransom Center’s collections and some of the finest examples of modern book design featuring Biblical texts.

Co-curators Richard Oram and Ryan Hildebrand write about the different ways printers, book designers, and artists have approached the artistic presentation of the King James Bible in “Making it New: The Bible and Modernist Book Arts.”

The King James Bible: Its History and Influence runs through July 29.

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.

Please be aware that Photo Friday will be on hiatus during the summer, but will return in September.

Singer/Songwriters Lloyd Maines, Terri Hendrik, Monte Warden and Michael Hall perform at Wednesday’s Poetry on the Plaza. Photo by Pete Smith.

Rachel Appel delivers her capstone presentation on digital asset management systems. Photo by Pete Smith.

Susan Buckley spoke about the work of her husband Peter Buckley photographer and author. Photo by Pete Smith.