Not everyone remembers that Harry Ransom was a fisher of minds as well as of rare books and manuscripts. One of his early catches was William B. Todd, an up-and-coming young bibliographer at Harvard’s Houghton Library who had done his graduate work at the University of Chicago. Todd had served with distinction during World War II, receiving two wounds during the Normandy Invasion. In the late 1950s, Ransom saw that Todd might become the bibliographic intelligence behind the Humanities Research Center, then just a vision.

Once in Austin, Bill Todd, who died this past weekend, settled into a comfortable berth in…

James Salter is being honored later this month with The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize, which is awarded annually to a “distinguished member of the literary community who has demonstrated a strong and unique commitment to literature.” The award will be presented to Salter by Robert Redford, who, in an unrelated program, will speak on a panel on campus with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein later this month about the legacy of All the President’s Men.

Previous recipients have included Ransom Center authors Norman Mailer and Peter Matthiessen.

In honor of the award, the magazine is highlighting essays about Salter’s work by such writers as Jhumpa Lahiri, Ian Crouch, Alexander Chee, Louisa Thomas, Geoff Dyer, Doree Shafrir, and…

A digital preview of archive materials relating to David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King is now live on the Ransom Center’s website. The preview, a collaboration between the Center and publisher Little, Brown and Company, includes a series of drafts of the “Author’s Foreword,” which eventually became chapter nine of The Pale King. Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s longtime editor, provides context about the pages and elaborates on the publication of the novel.

In 2010, the Ransom Center acquired and made accessible Wallace’s archive. The archive contains manuscript materials for Wallace’s books, stories and essays, research materials, Wallace’s college and graduate school writings, juvenilia, including poems, stories and letters, teaching materials, and books. Materials for…

Noah Gordon is a Master of Arts student in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He teaches tenth grade American Literature as a student teacher at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. He recently spent time at the Ransom Center gathering materials to use in his classroom with high school sophomores and writes here about that experience.

Your high school English teacher probably wanted only your final draft. Even process-based writing instructors expect the final version to represent the author’s best work: scrubbed of grammatical errors and clunkers, defined and refined in logic and narrative structure. As much as possible, the product should be perfect.

It’s no wonder that writing is…

Research in archival libraries like the Harry Ransom Center can be a bit of a treasure hunt. Every so often, researchers strike scholarly gold: locating and publishing previously unpublished works.

The most recent unearthing at the Ransom Center are unpublished short stories by crime writer Dashiell Hammett, whose archive resides at the Ransom Center. Andrew Gulli, managing editor of The Strand Magazine, located one short story, untitled but nicknamed “So I Shot Him,” which he will publish in the February 28 issue of The Strand.

This story has received much attention, raising the question: how do discoveries at the Ransom Center come about?

Molly Schwartzburg, Ransom Center Curator of Literature, calls…

Applications are being accepted by the Ransom Center for the Mellon Summer Institute in Spanish Paleography, occurring in Austin June 6-24, 2011. The institute is an opportunity for scholars to acquire intensive training in reading late medieval and early modern manuscripts of Spain and Latin America. All application materials must be received by Tuesday, March 1, 2011.

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

Michael Laird, adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin and the proprietor of Michael Laird Rare Books, shares some recent discoveries he made about a Bible in the Ransom Center’s collection.

Scholarship begets scholarship; ergo bibliography, the study of books as physical objects, builds upon earlier discoveries, while seeking to answer questions about the transmission of texts, the provenance of books, and their bindings.

In fall of 2009, Ryan Hildebrand, head of book cataloging at the Ransom Center, wrote about an unusual nineteenth-century fore-edge painting that adorns a fifteenth-century book at the Ransom Center, namely a Latin Bible, printed in 1481 by Johann Amerbach, of Basel.¹

While the name of the fore-edge painter (John T. Beers), is known ², questions remain about the bookbinding itself, and of the manuscript fragment contained therein, specifically: When and where was the binding made? Can we identify the text of the manuscript fragment, and determine its date of origin?

It is an extraordinary fact that certain ornamental tools that were stamped on early bookbindings were unique to a particular workshop and thus can help to identify specific binderies—or even specific bookbinders. The study of early bookbindings has made significant progress during the last decade, particularly in Germany where vast databases of Gothic bookbinding tools now appear online³.

Careful study of the Ransom Center’s bookbinding reveals an actual name-stamp on the front and back covers. The binding is also adorned with ornamental stamps of birds, flowers, hearts, and Evangelist symbols. (View the above slideshow for more images of these stamps.)

After more than 500 years of use, many of these stamps are no longer easy to see. In special cases, a light pencil rubbing can reveal much more than meets the eye. It was determined that the Ransom Center’s binding is such a case, and Associate Director and Hobby Foundation Librarian Richard Oram gave special permission for rubbings to be made in this instance. These rubbings were then compared with other rubbings that were taken from known binderies of the fifteenth-century.

The name on the binding of the Ransom Center’s 1481 Bible is Johannes Meigfoge. Meigfoge is known to have been active in Ellwangen, Germany, during the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century. Meigfoge’s workshop was first described by Ernst Kryss⁴, who failed to localize the bindery, but located 38 bindings by Meigfoge, including 35 books printed in the years 1475 through 1513, and 3 manuscripts. The location of Meigfoge’s workshop was convincingly assigned to Ellwangen (eastern Baden-Württemberg) by Heribert Hummel, in 1977.⁵

Inside the front and back boards of the present binding may be seen an extremely ancient fragment of manuscript that dates from the ninth-century.⁶ Whereas fragments from old manuscripts were commonly used as strengtheners by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century bookbinders, scholars rarely encounter manuscript material as old as this fragment. And so we can deduce that in the fifteenth-century, this small piece of parchment waste was used by Johannes Meigfoge to strengthen the inside of the spine, where it is still preserved therein.

Although the text of the fragment is hardly extensive, the Caroline minuscule handwriting is quite clear, and reads: In quam cumq[ue] domum intraveritis pri[mum dicite: pac huic domui. This text is from the New Testament, specifically Luke, chapter 10, verse 5:

“Into whatsoever house you enter, first say: ‘Peace be to this house.’”

Words of wisdom from a hitherto unknown ninth-century manuscript fragment—easily the oldest Biblical text at The University of Texas at Austin— afforded by the study of books as physical objects. With its nineteenth-century fore-edge painting, it is a remarkable fact that in one volume we are able to discover evidence of ca. 1000 years of book history.

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¹HRC Incun 1481 B471a

²Jeff Weber, Fore-Edge Paintings of John T. Beer (Los Angeles: J. Weber Rare Books, 2005)

³The Einbanddatenbank of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (accessed 8/8/2010)

⁴Ernst Kyriss, Verzierte gotische Einbande im alten deutschen Sprachgebiet (Stuttgart: Max Hettler, 1953), Tafelband I, no. 53. Ilse Schunke, Die Schwenke-Sammlung gotisher Stempel- und Eingbanddurchreibungen (Berlin, 1996) II, p. 257, offers no evidence for the assignment of this workshop to “Tubingen.”

⁵Heribert Hummel, “Johannes Meigfoge, ein Ellwanger Buchbinder des 15. Jahrhunderts” (in: Ellwanger Jahrbuch Bd. 27, 1977/78, pp. 187–194).

⁶Compare the ninth-century Latin Bible fragment at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley: f2MS A2M2 800:3, reproduced by Digital Scriptorium. (accessed 8/8/2010). The Bancroft fragment is thought to be German (as here?)

Bonnie Nadell, longtime literary agent of David Foster Wallace, shares her thoughts on what scholars can learn from Wallace’s archive about his creative process:

Organizing David Wallace’s papers for an archive was not a task I would wish on many people. Some writers leave their papers organized, boxed, and with careful markers, David left his work in a dark, cold garage filled with spiders and in no order whatsoever. His wife and I took plastic bins and cardboard boxes and desk drawers and created an order out of chaos, putting manuscripts for each book together and writing labels in magic markers.

But what scholars and readers will find fascinating I…

Micah Erwin is a student in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin specializing in rare books and special collections librarianship. He earned a masters degree in medieval studies, and his research interests include the preservation and cataloging of medieval manuscripts and early printed books. He shares some discoveries he made about a medieval manuscript in the Ransom Center’s collections. HRC 44 is the unique number assigned to this particular manuscript in the Center’s Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Collection. Early manuscripts in the Ransom Center’s collections are often identified by a unique number called a shelfmark that is assigned during the cataloging process.

There were many manuscripts produced in the Middle Ages whose scribes remained anonymous.…