Page from "Monarchia Solipsorum: ad virum clarissimum Leonum Allatium" in the Ranuzzi manuscript collection.

Shaun Stalzer is a graduate student in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin specializing in special collections librarianship. He earned his master’s degree in American history from Texas State University in San Marcos, and his research interests include the history of American theater. Here, he discusses a manuscript he studied as part of a rare books class in the School of Information.

The Harry Ransom Center holds an extensive collection of rare Italian manuscripts, printed materials, engravings, etchings, woodcuts, watercolors, and papal bulls from the Ranuzzi family of Bologna, Italy. The collection spans some 400 years and provides insight into the social, political, and…

'The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956'

Last fall, Cambridge University Press published The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 2: 1941–1956. Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, the volume is the second in a four-part series offering a comprehensive range of Samuel Beckett’s letters.

In compiling this edition, the editors consulted the Samuel Beckett papers at the Ransom Center, from which more than 15 percent of the letters in this volume were drawn.

“The Letters of Samuel Beckett,” a project of the Emory Laney Graduate School, will result in the publication of two additional volumes that feature Beckett materials from around the world.

The Modern Language Association of America recently announced that the first book in the series, The…

Al Hirschfeld's 1954 letter to Edward Weeks. © Al Hirschfeld. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld's exclusive representative, the Margo Feiden Galleries, Ltd., New York. www.alhirschfeld.com.

John Steinbeck stamped his letters with a winged pig, Muhammad Ali’s letterhead alludes to his catchphrase “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” and Al Hirschfeld signed his letters with a spiral-eyed self-portrait. Read about what we can learn from these and other illustrated letters found across the Ransom Center’s collections.

Plantin Polyglot Bible, 1569-1573.

A completely revised Guide to the Collections has appeared on the Center’s website, superseding one based largely on the published edition of 2003 (now out of print). The Guide does not replace standard cataloging but supplements it, emphasizing topical access across the collections.

Changes in scholarship since the first edition of the Guide was published in 1990 are reflected in the new version. For example, there wasn’t a Gay and Lesbian chapter in the 1990 guide; one was added in 2003, and in 2010 it has expanded into a long section on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer (LGBTQ) studies. The history of the book was just finding its way as a discipline back in 1990 (when it…

Major and minor doctoral theses manuscripts by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Photo by Pete Smith.

The Ransom Center has acquired the manuscripts of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s major and minor doctoral theses. The typed theses, annotated with handwritten corrections, were presented by Lévi-Strauss at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1948 upon completion of his doctorate in humanities. Lévi-Strauss’s major thesis, “Les structures élémentaires de la parenté,” was published in English as “The Elementary Structures of Kinship” in 1949. In the thesis, he proposed the “alliance theory,” a structuralist model for the anthropological study of relations and kinship. His minor thesis, “La vie familiale et sociale des indiens Nambikwara” (”The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians”), is an ethnography of an indigenous…

Title page of the libretto for Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini's L'Euridice, Florence, 1600.

A major collection of Italian opera libretti is now accessible through an online database. The collection of 3,421 items was donated in 1969 by New York rare book dealer Hans P. Kraus. The collection consists primarily of texts of Italian operas but also includes Italian cantatas, serenatas, oratorios, dialogues and Passions. The collection, which dates from the 17th through the 20th century, documents musical performances by Italian, French, German and Austrian composers performed in numerous Italian cities and elsewhere. Learn more about the collection.

Franco-Mauritian author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wrote his first book at the age of eight, published an award-winning first novel at 23, has garnered comparisons to Albert Camus, and won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. Decades prior, Le Clézio spent time as a scholar in residence at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about this lauded author and see his reading list for a 1976 University of Texas seminar on modern French literature in Jesse Cordes Selbin’s article “Existentialism for Beginners.”