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Sebastian Barry Visit : : page 11
Breathing in Literature : : page 2
Technologies of Writing : : page 4
de niro collection
A new archive arrives : : page 6
RANSOM EDITION
Summer 2006
Harry Ransom Center

RANSOM EDITION
Volume 13 : : Issue 2
Summer 2006
RANSOM EDITION is published
biannually for members and friends
of the Harry Ransom Center at
The University of Texas at Austin.
To change your contact information,
please notify:
Alicia Dietrich, Editor
Ransom Edition
Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin
P.O. Box 7219
Austin, TX 78713
aliciadietrich@mail.utexas.edu
HOURS
Ransom Center Galleries
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Thursday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday noon to 5 p.m.
Library Reading Room and
Visual Materials Viewing Room
Monday–Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday 9 a.m. to noon
(No Saturday hours for visual
materials viewing)
Phone: 512-471-8944
Fax: 512-471-9646
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu
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sign up for eUpdates at
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Unless otherwise noted, photography
by Pete Smith or Eric Beggs.
Cover photo: Detail of hack license
used in preparation for Taxi Driver.
Robert De Niro Collection.
Cover background: Shooting script
from Raging Bull.
Robert De Niro Collection.
The publishers have made every effort to
contact all copyright holders for permissions.
Those we have been unable to reach are
invited to contact us so that a full
acknowledgment may be given.
© 2006 Harry Ransom Center.
All rights reserved.
This spring the Ransom Center announced its acquisition of the remarkable archive of actor
Robert De Niro. A gift from De Niro, the collection includes not only annotated scripts,
notes, research materials, and video and audio recordings, but also an extensive collection
of the costumes he wore.
It is an important collection in our cultural history. De Niro appeared in key
films of the Hollywood renaissance of the 1960s, and his influence and
artistic excellence continue today. De Niro is one of the most celebrated
actors in America, and the roles he has portrayed in such iconic films as
Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Deer Hunter have become touchstones
of our culture.
Through De Niro’s extensive notes and research materials, one can see the
vital creative process—how he transformed words into live action, how
he crossed genres, moving from script to screen. The collection will garner
both scholarly and popular interest, but perhaps most exciting for us is the
enthusiasm it has generated on campus, especially among departments
not traditionally associated with our collections. The Department of Human
Ecology, which has the only graduate program in the region in clothing
conservation, and the Costume Technology program in the Department of
Theatre and Dance will be given unprecedented access to the collection
for use in teaching costume design and textile conservation. These
departments will also work with the Center on the long-term conservation
needs of the costumes. We are pleased to build a partnership with these
departments and strengthen the ties of the Ransom Center to the teaching
mission of the University. Another key player in this acquisition was
George Mitchell of the University Co-op, who has generously agreed to
help support the care and conservation of the costumes.
The acquisition of De Niro’s archive enhances a remarkably strong film
collection at the Ransom Center. His materials will join the archives of
such film notables as David O. Selznick, Gloria Swanson, Steve Martin, and
Ernest Lehman. De Niro will also support a research fellowship in film, and
he will visit the Center in 2007 to celebrate both the acquisition and our
50 th anniversary.
Every summer, friends and members of the Ransom Center ask me for book
recommendations as they put together their summer reading lists. I read
less contemporary fiction than I once did, but many of our staff members follow current
literature closely. With this newsletter, we begin a new column that will feature
recommendations of contemporary works. Happy reading.
Thomas F. Staley,
Director, Harry Ransom Center
Director’s note

denotes a link to
additional materials on the
Ransom Center’s website
CONTENTS
6
De
Niro
Archive
Ransom Center
acquires Robert
De Niro archive
The Sweet Smell
of Provenance 2
Fleur Cowles
Flair Symposium
registration is open 3
5
Recommended
Reading
Staff present their
summer reading picks
In the Galleries : :
Technologies of Writing
and The Image Wrought:
Historical Photographic
Approaches in
the Digital Age 4
Research at the
Ransom Center : :
“Miss Universe, Mr. Uris,
and The Archive” 8
10
Fathoms From
Anywhere
Online exhibition
celebrates centennial
of Samuel Beckett
Calendar
Events and upcoming
13exhibitions
Molly Schwartzburg : :
new Curator of British
and American Literature 9
In Memoriam : :
Carlton Lake 10
Et Ceterata 12
Ransom Edition : :

The Sweet Smell of Provenance
by Rich Oram and Edward L. Bishop
A characteristic item found in libraries’ special
collections is the so-called association copy, a book whose
significance derives from its connection with a well-known writer,
artist, or historical figure. The Harry Ransom Center at The University
of Texas at Austin is legendary for owning no fewer than 34 of the
1,000 copies of the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, many
of which are association copies.
One copy—which used to belong to T. E. Lawrence, better known as
Lawrence of Arabia—stands out for its full range of appeals to the
senses. The volume has been rebound in sumptuous wine-red leather
ornamented with gilt, and it gives every indication of frequent use,
including a well-rubbed binding. Inside, on more than 150 pages, are
pencil annotations about the Dublin landmarks in Joyce’s masterpiece,
as well as more than a few black smudges and even a couple
of biscuit crumbs.
In addition, Lawrence’s copy of Ulysses is remarkable for its smell.
The book has been shown to many visitors and students over the
years. When it is carefully removed from the shelf and ceremoniously
divested of its acid-free box, which helps preserve the volume, even
from several inches away you can smell a sweet, somewhat smoky
aroma that suffuses every bit of paper and leather. Many people
assume it must be the residue of pipe tobacco, perhaps the fruitscented
variety. The aroma is a spur to the imagination, summoning
up romantic visions of Lawrence by his fireside, puffing reflectively on
a meerschaum, immersed in the drama of Leopold Bloom.
The aroma made its way into the pages of Nicholas A. Basbanes’s
A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an
Impermanent World (HarperCollins, 2003), which looks at why
libraries preserve the items they do. Basbanes noted that the Ransom
Center has collected so many copies of Ulysses in part because
of their associations. Not surprisingly, he focused on the singularly
sensual Lawrence copy and the “tobacco” scent.
Basbanes’s reference to Lawrence’s pipe was piquant enough to draw
the attention of a book reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement. A
Lawrence devotee spotted the review and wrote a letter to the Times
saying that the scent could not be tobacco because Lawrence never
smoked a pipe (Ed Maggs, a London rare-books dealer and Lawrence
admirer, had earlier made the same point during a visit to the Ransom
Center). Another correspondent had a theory that the smell was ink.
Sniffing a literary controversy in the making, one of us—
Richard Oram—decided to have the copy examined scientifically.
State-of-the-art tests by a company specializing in the analysis of
commercial scents would have been costly and time-consuming.
Some books in the Ransom Center’s collections tell a story just by their smells.
This copy of Ulysses, which belonged to T. E. Lawrence, has a sweet, smoky
scent that reveals much about the book’s history and its handlers.
The more practical alternative was to test the aroma on eight of the
Center’s conservators, whose highly trained noses are so acute that
they could detect the differences between strains of molds. The verdict
was split: Some of the eight thought they smelled deteriorated leather;
others voted for ashes, pipe smoke, the exhaust from Lawrence’s famous
motorbike, and even licorice.
As so often happens in special-collections libraries, a hallway conversation
between a curator and a scholar—the authors of this essay—uncovered
the solution. Edward Bishop’s research on the Lawrence copy,
which had been published in the 1998 Joyce Studies Annual, revealed
that the marginalia in the volume were not in Lawrence’s hand. Mainly
factual notes to do with Dublin, they were by his friend W. M. M. Hurley
and may have been written for Lawrence, who had trouble getting
through the book.
Ransom Edition : :

Recent Acquisitions
Lawrence once complained to the painter Eric Kennington, “Arnold Bennett...
said the perfect word about Ulysses, when he swore that Joyce had
made novel-reading a form of penal servitude... Such dull stuff... It goes
on for ever.”
While stationed at the Royal Air Force base in Karachi, Pakistan, Lawrence
lent books to the “book-hungry men.” He wrote to George Bernard Shaw’s
wife, Charlotte: “We are rough, and dirty handed, so that some of the volumes
are nearly read to death. You can tell the pet ones, by their
shabbiness.” The crumbs and stains in Lawrence’s Ulysses testify to
servicemen’s reading the book on their breaks with a mug of tea and a biscuit.
Or perhaps a pipe.
In another case of olfactory scholarship, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid,
authors of The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press,
2000), refer to the medical historian who was seen sniffing eighteenthcentury
papers in a Portuguese archive. He could determine how far a cholera
outbreak had traveled by detecting the telltale smell of vinegar used as a
disinfectant, which was still attached to the paper after more than two
centuries. As Brown and Duguid observe, scent cannot be conveyed in any
digitized form (at least until a digital scratch-and-sniff is invented).
Librarians and archivists have long known that the mysterious spoor of
provenance—the fascination provoked by the famous people who once
owned objects like books, manuscripts, and clothes—enthralls both
professional scholars and casual visitors to exhibitions. An object connected
to a celebrity provides a frisson, a sense of contact with the past and with
the famous person.
The encounter with the Lawrence Ulysses had convinced Bishop—who
was then in the early stages of writing Riding With Rilke: Reflections on
Motorcycles and Books (Viking Canada, 2005)—that working in an archive
is like riding a motorcycle: You read the topography of the texts as well as
the linguistic codes; you get a perceptual jolt as well as an intellectual thrill.
Responding to handwriting, looking at the stamps on letters, feeling and
sniffing paper, hearing the flap of heavy parchment pages, you read with all
your senses.
Lawrence’s sweet-smelling Ulysses is unusually evocative because it
“speaks” to the human sense most closely associated with memory. That
association copy is truly associative, relating a story not only about Lawrence,
as it turns out, but about other readers as well. Although the olfactory element
is rare, most books in special collections have their tales to tell, their
sweet smell of provenance. Without denying the considerable research value
of digital surrogates, we maintain that only preserving original artifacts can
ensure that future readers will be able to share the same sensory experience.
Richard W. Oram is Associate Director and Hobby Foundation Librarian
at the Ransom Center. Edward L. Bishop is a Professor of English at the
University of Alberta. This article originally appeared in the Chronicle of
Higher Education on September 30, 2005.
: : The complete archive of actor Robert De Niro,
including annotated film scripts, research
materials and notes, correspondence, video and
audio recordings, photographs, and costumes
: : The papers of British writer and playwright
Simon Gray
: : An extensive collection of books by detective novelist
John D. MacDonald
: : The archive of Fiction Collective writer Steve Katz
: : A collection of letters by American writer
James Salter
: : Scores and choreographic notes used to stage the
first ballet performance of David Guion’s “Shingandi”
: : The papers of bibliographers William B. Todd and
Ann Bowden, related to their publishing projects and
work at the Ransom Center
: : Additional materials for the archives of Sebastian
Barry, Sybille Bedford, Sanora Babb, Christine
Brooke-Rose, Shelby Hearon, Bernard Kops,
Penelope Lively, and the Peter Owen
publishing firm
2006 Fleur Cowles
Flair Symposium
Registration is now open for the 2006 Fleur Cowles
Flair Symposium, The Sense of Our Time: Norman
Mailer and America in Conflict. The symposium will
take place November 9–11, 2006.
Speakers at the symposium will use Mailer’s works as
starting points for the exploration of the cultural conflicts
that confronted post-WWII America, from civil
rights to war, from sexual politics to the rise of New
Journalism. Speakers include Pulitzer Prize-winning
author David Oshinsky of The University of Texas at
Austin, Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times, Morris
Dickstein of the CUNY Center
for the Humanities, and Norman
Mailer. The Flair Symposium,
held biennially at the Ransom
Center, honors the ideals set
forth by Fleur Cowles and her
landmark Flair magazine.
8
For more information, visit
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/flair,
call 512-471-8944, or
email Robert Fulton at kaspar@mail.utexas.edu
Ransom Edition : :

IN THE GALLERIES
In the Galleries: Technologies of Writing
The Ransom Center’s current exhibition, Technologies of
Writing, which runs through August 6, documents the
evolution and history of writing.
Writing is perhaps man’s greatest invention. Not even the
development of language is comparable, for all species have
a means of communication. Writing, though, is what enables
language to be copied and stored. Writing provides us with
a cultural memory, which is in large part what makes us
human.
The exhibition, curated by Professor Kurt Heinzelman and
graduate student Elizabeth Garver, with assistance from
many other faculty and staff members, showcases rare,
original artifacts dating from 2000 BCE to the present.
Featured items range from cuneiform tablets to electronic
texts, showing that the development of writing is ongoing
and responsive to technological innovations.
In the Galleries: The Image Wrought
Running though August 6, The Image Wrought:
Historical Photographic Approaches in the
Digital Age highlights the work of contemporary
photographers who embrace antiquated nineteenth-century
practices.
The nearly universal practice of digital
photography has motivated some photographers to
revert back to seemingly obsolete processes with
unique and unpredictable outcomes that better
reflect the artist’s touch in the face of the pristine
pixel. Curator Linda Briscoe Myers says, “The
exhibition demonstrates that there is an inherent
tactile beauty to these handcrafted images that
differ from those produced entirely through digital technology.”
Drawn from the Ransom Center’s extensive photographic collection, the
exhibition offers the unique opportunity to see the contemporary pieces paired
alongside their vintage predecessors, which were produced by the same
processes more than 100 years earlier. The pairings create a dialog that
reveals how the modern photographer approaches his or her historical model.
FROM TECHNOLOGIES OF WRITING
Korean type; 18th century
FROM THE IMAGE WROUGHT
Left: Anna Atkins
Specimen of Cyanotype - Peacock [feathers], 1845;
Cyanotype
Right: © Jesseca Ferguson
Songs Without Words, 2000;
Pinhole Ware cyanotype, sheet music, book board
The exhibition offers nearly 70 examples of contemporary and nineteenthcentury
photographs that explore not only historical processes, but also
camera technology, photographs made on alternative supports, and photographs
with surface treatments.
Read The Economist’s review of the exhibition
8 at http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition.
Ransom Edition : :

Recommended Reading
Megan Barnard, Assistant to Director Tom Staley, and Jackie Carroll, a librarian and book cataloger at the Ransom Center, collaborate to
identify up-and-coming talents for the Ransom Center’s contemporary authors book-collecting program. The Center collects first editions
of writers identified for this program, hoping to build its holdings in the works of writers whose reputations will grow with the years. Here
are their recommendations for summer reading.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
(Sceptre, 2004)
This book is a clever puzzle of sorts, with Mitchell weaving six
stories and points in time into a single frame. The writing is
lush, contemplative, and witty, with plots that keep the pages
turning. It’s an enthralling and impressive work.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
(Houghton Mifflin, 2005)
The second novel of this talented writer follows nine-yearold
Oskar Schell on his mission to find the lock that fits a key
belonging to his father, who was killed in the attacks on the
World Trade Center. Foer finds some of the most devastatingly
beautiful ways to express grief and how people come to terms
with it.
Brick Lane by Monica Ali (Doubleday, 2003)
Spanning approximately 30 years and culminating around 9/11,
this novel looks at the life of a young Bengali woman in an
arranged marriage, living in the East London neighborhood of
Brick Lane. It deals with the larger contemporary issues of
immigration and acceptance while focusing on the emotional
and physical maturity of a young woman.
Also of note are the new
books of two Texas writers, Stephen
Harrigan’s Challenger Park (Knopf,
2006) and Elizabeth Crook’s
The Night Journal (Viking, 2006)
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
(Faber, 2005)
It’s no surprise to learn, after reading this lyrical novel, that
Barry is also a talented poet. He tells a moving story about the
almost-forgotten Irish soldiers of World War I who fought in
the British Army while their homeland erupted into a struggle
for independence. He writes with compassion about the fear,
confusion, and mixed loyalties of these young Irishmen. Barry’s
archive is housed at the Ransom Center.
2006 promotional sponsors.
The Ransom Center would like to give special thanks to our 2006 promotional sponsors:
Ransom Edition : :

Robert De Niro Donates
Collection of Film Materials
to Harry Ransom Center
Hack license used in preparation for Taxi Driver (1976).
Robert De Niro Collection. Harry Ransom Center.
Actor, director, producer Robert
DeNiro has donated his complete collection of
film-related materials to the Ransom Center.
With materials from the late 1960s to the
present, the archive includes annotated scripts,
notes, research materials, and an extensive collection
of the costumes DeNiro wore in his films.
The paper portion of the collection, more than
100 boxes, has considerable research value.
It includes scripts and books with handwritten
notations, correspondence with film notables
such as Martin Scorsese and Elia Kazan, background
research, and the notebooks DeNiro kept
of his films, all showing the evolution from text to
moving image.
The costume portion of the collection includes
more than 3,000 individual costume items, props
from many of DeNiro’s films, and a full body cast
used in the 1994 production of Frankenstein.
“One of the most important things about the
Harry Ransom Center is that the material will be
accessible to students and the public,”
Shooting Script from The Deer Hunter (1978).
Robert De Niro Collection. Harry Ransom Center.
Ransom Edition : :

Hat worn by “Johnny Boy” in Mean Streets (1973).
Robert De Niro Collection. Harry Ransom Center.
said DeNiro.
“Ultimately, that’s
what it’s all about.”
The DeNiro archive enhances the film collection at the Ransom Center
and adds significantly to the Center’s holdings in Hollywood filmmaking
of the late 20th century. A fellowship will be established to support
scholarly research in the collection.
“This acquisition broadens opportunities for scholars and students to
study new areas of film, such as the actor’s role in authorship,” said
Thomas F. Staley, Director of the Ransom Center.
DeNiro is regarded as one of the greatest actors of his generation and a
key figure in “The New Hollywood,” an artistic renaissance that began
in the late 1960s. He appeared in many of the period’s key films:
Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Godfather: Part II (1974),
and The Deer Hunter (1978). DeNiro has produced more than two
dozen films since the late 1980s and directed A Bronx Tale (1993) and
the soon to be released The Good Shepherd.
“DeNiro is renowned for the meticulous research he puts into each
role, and all that material is present in the collection: books, manuscripts,
costumes, interviews, photographs, videotapes—everything,”
said Steve Wilson, Associate Curator of the Ransom Center’s film collection.
“The collection is awe-inspiring in its depth and scope. I know of
no other actor’s archive that is as large and comprehensive as this one.”
The University’s Department of
Human Ecology in the College of
Natural Sciences, the Department of Radio-
Television-Film in the College of Communication, and the
Department of Theatre and Dance in the College of Fine Arts
have all expressed excitement about using the collection.
The departments of Human Ecology and Theatre and Dance are
especially interested in the costume portion of the collection.
Costume selection is an integral part of DeNiro’s process of
character development, and thus the wardrobe component of the
archive is remarkably rich.
Fred Heath, Vice Provost and Director of University of Texas
Libraries, offered assistance with the housing of the costume
portion of the collection.
Another key figure in this acquisition is George Mitchell, President
of University Co-op. Mitchell has agreed to support the preservation
and housing of the costumes and display some of the collection
materials in the Co-op’s gallery. Mitchell and the Co-op’s support of
the Ransom Center has funded acquisitions, exhibitions,
and lectures.
Select items from the DeNiro collection were on view in the
Ransom Center’s lobby in June. Once processed, cataloged, and
housed, the collection will be available for research.
Makeup photo
for Godfather II
(1974).
Robert De Niro
Collection.
Harry Ransom
Center.
Shooting Script
from Raging Bull
(1980).
Robert De Niro
Collection.
Harry Ransom
Center.
Ransom Edition : :

Research at the Ransom Center:
Miss Universe, Mr. Uris,
and The Archive
by Ira B. Nadel
Miss Universe and Leon Uris seem at first an unusual
couple. But from research in the Uris archive at the Ransom Center,
the unexpected connection is clear.
As one of America’s most popular writers from 1953 until his death in
2003, Uris received numerous honors, awards, and praise, although
he liked to introduce himself as a “12-time Pulitzer Prize loser.”
Nevertheless, in pursuing details of this remarkable writer’s life for
a forthcoming biography, I came across an unusual set of items in
his scrapbooks: airline tickets, passports, hotel receipts, press clippings,
and the program for the 1975 Miss Universe contest held in El
Salvador. Uris was a judge, joining Peter Lawford, Susan Strasberg,
Sarah Vaughan, Ernest Borgnine, and Olympic skier Jean-Claude Killy.
Background sheets on each of the twelve finalists accompany a copy
of Uris’s itinerary and program for the final judging. It was to take
place in the redecorated National Gymnasium of El Salvador, transformed
into a gigantic Mayan pyramid. Scrapbook photos show the
judges—Uris in a white tuxedo with frill shirt—hard at work jotting
down comments and responses before selecting Miss Finland, Anne
Marie Pohtamo, as the winner.
Uris’s autographed program from the event contains amusing remarks
from his fellow judges: the actress Susan Strasberg wrote “If I only
had a larger social conscience.” The journalist Max Lerner offered
“To Jill and Leon—beauty and the beast—each of you with great
powers,” while the skier Jean-Claude Killy exclaimed “from one skier
& great one to another skier & better one!” Such colorful remarks are
irresistible in an account of the novelist’s life.
The Miss Universe contest is only one of numerous discoveries in the
Uris archive, which first arrived at the Ransom Center in 1997. Among
the more interesting items included is an outline and research notes
for an unwritten novel about immigrants in the lower East Side of
New York and a completed but unpublished children’s story entitled
“Secrets of Forever Island.“ Vivid letters written to his stepsister and
parents during his Marine Corps training in 1942—Uris dropped out
of high school to enlist only weeks after Pearl Harbor—reveal details
of his military life, which provided source material for his first novel,
Battle Cry. Other discoveries include criticism from the Israeli
Foreign Office of errors in an early draft of Exodus, the actual transcript
of his 1964 English libel case, which he would turn into QBVII,
and a copy of his first fan letter. An added bonus are hundreds of
photographs he took as part of his research for novels Exodus
and Trinity.
Secondary material can provide additional insight about a subject,
and for Uris one of the most interesting early events in his career was
the world premier of the 1955 movie Battle Cry. Press accounts of
Ransom Edition : :
Ira B. Nadel, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia
and research fellow at the Ransom Center, works with materials from
the Leon Uris archive in the reading room.
the gala in Baltimore, Uris’s home town, detail the support of the entire
city. A wonderful letter by Uris’s wife, Betty, to her parents with her
impression of the event supplements the public record. The presence of
movie stars Dorothy Malone, Mona Freeman, the director Raoul Walsh,
plus the young heartthrob Tab Hunter, meant a sellout of the 2,800-seat
Stanley Theatre. Uris stayed on, but the stars left for the opening the
next day in New York. Capitalizing on his skyrocketing appeal, Warner
Bros. had Tab Hunter appear at the 8:30 a.m. show to hand out pairs of
nylons to the first 100 female guests.
The archive charts Uris’s development as a writer from juvenile efforts
as a dramatist to his detailed research for his massive novel about
Ireland, Trinity. His travel for novels like Mila 18 and Armageddon
are thoroughly documented, as are his unsuccessful attempts to bring
Exodus to the stage as the musical Ari and efforts to write filmscripts
for his major novels. Further riches include the record of his philanthropic
activities and correspondence with his readers. Asked to name
the most influential books in his life, he cites the work of Steinbeck.
Asked when he planned to take up golf, he responds, “after my first
heart attack.” Asked his favorite passage from his own work, he
replies, “the end.”
From such disparate material, the personality of the writer emerges.
Access to such material is invaluable, and biographers can never
have enough of it.
Ira B. Nadel, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and
frequent visitor to the Ransom Center’s archives, is the author of biographies
of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, and Ezra Pound. A Dorot Fellowship
supported his work at the Ransom Center.
8
Learn more about the Leon Uris archive at
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition.

Molly Schwartzburg joins Ransom Center
as Curator of British and American Literature
The Ransom Center
announces the appointment
of Dr. Molly Schwartzburg as
Curator of British and
American Literature.
Schwartzburg arrives at
the Center after teaching in
the Program in Structured
Liberal Education at Stanford
University as a Post-Doctoral
Fellow. The program allows
both professors and students to embrace multiple disciplines, such as
political science, literature, and philosophy, while exploring great books of
civilization chronologically.
She earned her Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford
in 2004, with a specialization in modern and contemporary poetry and
the avant-garde. She worked as an archivist at Stanford and earlier as an
assistant in preservation at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where
she earned her M.A degree.
Throughout her career, Schwartzburg has embraced an interdisciplinary
approach that explores both literature and the visual arts. In her research
on contemporary artists’ books, works that blend together art and the
written word, questions often arise over where such works belong. But
the Ransom Center helps solve that dilemma for her.
“The best thing about the Ransom Center is that it lies somewhere between
a library and a museum,” says Schwartzburg. “Institutional barriers
are dissolved here between literature and visual art, allowing audiences
to think comparatively.”
Schwartzburg replaces John Kirkpatrick, who served as the Ransom
Center’s Curator of British and American Literature for almost 35 years
before retiring in 2005.
Ransom Center Receives Design Awards
The Harry Ransom Center received two design awards in the 2006
American Association of Museums national Museum Publication
Design Competition.
The Ransom Center was the only Texas institution to earn a first-place
award, for its poster design for the exhibition Technologies of Writing.
The Center also earned honorable mention for its fall 2005 and spring
2006 program calendars. Leslie Ernst, graphic designer with the
University’s Office of Public Affairs, created the winning designs.
Judged by museum professionals, publishers, and designers, the
competition recognizes excellence in overall design.
The Ransom Center’s program calendar was also chosen by the American
Library Association as Best in Show in the “Calendars & Newsletters”
category from more than 360 entries.
Stella Adler and the
American Theater
The Ransom Center, the College of Fine Arts, the College
of Communication, the Austin Film Society, and the Austin
Circle of Theaters collaborated in the spring to present
“Stella Adler and the American Theater,” a series of public
programs celebrating legendary acting teacher Stella Adler.
The programs were part of the Ransom Center’s
“Signatures Series,” a series of events that highlight the
Center’s recent archival acquisitions. The Ransom Center
acquired Adler’s archive in 2004. The programs culminated
with a visit by filmmaker and former Adler student Peter
Bogdanovich, who spoke about his work and Adler at a
screening of his Academy Award-winning film The Last
Picture Show (1971).
Former Stella Adler student Peter Bogdanovich talks with Ransom
Center Director Thomas F. Staley before the Ransom Center’s
screening of The Last Picture Show.
The Alamo Drafthouse Downtown screened films
starring Adler’s students in a series titled “Method Acting
Masterpieces: The Adler School.” Films included On the
Waterfront (1954), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and
Taxi Driver (1976).
To learn more about the Stella Adler archive, visit
8 http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition.
Fellowships
The Ransom Center awarded 42 fellowships as part of its
2006–2007 research fellowship program. Visit our website
for the complete list of recipients and their research topics,
ranging from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British
piracy in the Americas to the legal life of Oscar Wilde.
8 http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition
Ransom Edition : :

In Memoriam: Carlton Lake
Carlton Lake, whose exceptional collection of modern French materials forms
the basis of the Harry Ransom Center’s French collection, died May 5, 2006, after a long battle with
Parkinson’s disease. He was 90.
Lake and his collection first came to the attention of Harry Ransom in the late 1960s, and by the
end of 1968, a large portion of what is now the Carlton Lake collection was making its way to
The University of Texas at Austin from Paris and Boston—the two places Lake called home. In 1969
Ransom brought Lake aboard as a consultant and offered him the position of “lifetime curator.” While
he considered the offer, Lake worked on the Baudelaire to Beckett exhibition, one of the Center’s first
blockbuster shows, mounted in 1976, which put Austin on the map as the leading institution outside
France for the study of French Modernism. In that same year, Lake accepted appointment as Curator of
the Center’s French collection.
Lake came to his new role not only as an active collector but also as an accomplished writer, having
served as an art critic in Paris for The Christian Science Monitor and author of articles, stories, essays,
and extended interviews (with Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Henry Moore, Giacometti, and others) in The
Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other American and European periodicals.
Among his book publications are A Dictionary of Modern Painting, In Quest of Dali, Life With
Picasso (co-authored with Françoise Gilot), and Confessions of a Literary Archeologist.
Carlton Lake with the first edition of
Alfred Jarry’s Léda, 1981.
The original manuscript (1899–1900) of
this one-act opérette-bouffe is in the
Lake collection, but the book was not
published until 1981. Lake was associated
with the Ransom Center for almost
35 years before his retirement in 2003.
In his 34-year association with the Ransom Center, Carlton Lake served as Curator of the French
Unidentified photographer
collection, Acting Director (1978–1980), and Executive Curator (1980–2003). He continued to make gifts to the collection and was responsible for
bringing to the Center major holdings, such as the Edward Weeks Atlantic Monthly papers, Anne Sexton’s archive, Ezra Pound’s library, Robert
Lowell’s papers, Nina Matheson’s Vladimir Nabokov collection, many Beckett correspondences, Maurice Saillet’s James Joyce and Alfred Jarry
collections, Edouard Dujardin’s archive, Edgard Varése’s library, and the Durand modern-music manuscript collection.
The Ransom Center’s current online exhibition, Fathoms from Anywhere: A Samuel Beckett Centenary Exhibition, is dedicated to Lake.
A memorial service for Carlton Lake was held on May 24 at the Ransom Center.
Web exhibition celebrates centennial of Samuel Beckett
The Ransom Center introduced an online exhibition, Fathoms From
Anywhere: A Samuel Beckett Centenary Exhibition, on April 13 to celebrate the
centennial of the birth of Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett (1906–1989).
The web exhibition traces Beckett’s career, using materials from the Ransom Center’s
collection. Exhibition highlights include a textual and pictorial overview of Beckett’s career,
brief biographies of his contemporaries and friends, and the opportunity for web visitors
to share their views on Beckett and his works.
“The online exhibition should be a destination not only for Beckett scholars, but for anyone
who wants to learn more about one of the twentieth century’s most notable writers,” said
Cathy Henderson, Associate Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the Ransom Center.
“Beckett created some of the most interesting work of our time and did so, uniquely, in
both English and French. We hope this exhibition will bring new readers to his work.”
Samuel Beckett’s first page of the second notebook
of Watt, dated “3/12/41.”
© Edward Beckett. Harry Ransom Center.
“For some, Beckett is one of the great comic writers of all time,” wrote Carlton Lake, former curator of the Ransom Center’s French collection, in
the introduction to the catalog for the 1984 Beckett exhibition No Symbols Where None Intended. “For others, his is a tragic world, bleak,
grim, even unbearable. And for still others, he is a religious writer, his works a witness to the indomitable spirit of the Godhead-in-man.”
The Ransom Center obtained its first substantial group of Beckett books and manuscripts in 1958 and continues to add to its holdings. Along
with its Beckett collection, the Ransom Center holds one of the world’s most renowned research collections of modern French materials,
including works of Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, Valentine Hugo, and Henri-Pierre Roché.
The research, design, and construction of the Beckett online exhibition was made possible through the assistance of the Gladys Krieble Delmas
Foundation and Humanities Texas. The online exhibition is dedicated to Carlton Lake (1915–2006).
Ransom Edition : : 10
8 View the online exhibition at http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/beckett.

Sebastian Barry
visits Ransom Center
Barry looks over Jean Cocteau’s address book, part of the
Carlton Lake collection, with Joan Sibley, who oversees archive
and manuscript cataloging.
The Next Chapter:
A Vision For the 21st Century
The Ransom Center is in the midst of a fundraising
campaign, titled “The Next Chapter: A Vision For the 21st
Century.” The campaign aims to bolster existing strengths
of the Center, from acquiring noteworthy collections to
enhancing curatorial excellence. Some highlights to date
include:
: : Meeting a challenge gift from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, generously endowing our research
fellowship program
: : Bringing the Norman Mailer collection to Austin
: : Naming the Art Gallery in honor of Albert and
Ethel Herzstein.
Gifts from a range of members, foundations, and friends
helped make these enhancements possible. With one year
to go in the campaign, we are making strong progress
toward accomplishing our goals in support of facilities, collections,
and public access.
With $9,332,792 raised as of April 30, 2006, we have
reached more than 85 percent of our goal of $10,875,000.
We invite you to join us in support of our mission by making
a gift or becoming a member today.
Irish novelist, poet, and playwright Sebastian Barry
recently visited the Ransom Center to meet with archivists and speak
to the Center’s Advisory Council. Barry, whose archive is housed at the
Ransom Center, was a finalist for the 2005 Man Booker Prize for his
novel A Long Long Way.
While visiting, Barry toured the Ransom Center, signed the “authors’
door,” and met with catalogers to answer questions about his archive.
The Center’s collection of Barry’s materials, acquired in 2001, includes
literary papers, drafts of Barry’s published and unpublished works,
illustrations, personal and business correspondence, notebooks, photographs,
personal papers, and clippings. The Center obtained additional
Barry material, mostly correspondence, in 2005.
Barry wanted to find a home for the expanding number of literary papers
in his house, and his friend Howard Woolmer recommended the Ransom
Center. Barry’s visit to the Center reinforced his decision. “The building
was breathing with magic. In the proper sense, I felt really honored,”
Barry said.
Barry’s archive is expected to be available for research later this year.
Barry’s signature on the “authors’ door” shows his fondness for Texas.
8
For more photos, an interview with Barry, and audio
clips of Barry discussing his work with an archivist,
visit http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition.
become a member
Members enjoy special events and opportunities to explore
the collections and meet the people that make the Ransom
Center an international resource for scholarship and intellectual
delight.
Visit http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/membership
8
or contact David Dibble at 512-232-3668 to join or
learn more.
OF interest...
Writer Don DeLillo produced two recent works:
Love Lies Bleeding, a play that explores a family’s struggle
over whether to take someone off of life support. Chicago’s
Steppenwolf Theatre staged the play for a month-long run in
late April.
Game 6, a new movie staring Michael Keeton, is based on a
script DeLillo wrote 15 years ago. The film, which is set against
the backdrop of the infamous Game 6 of the 1989 baseball
World Series between the New York Mets and the Boston Red
Sox, opened in April.
DeLillo’s archive is housed at the Ransom Center.
8
For more information about DeLillo’s archive, visit
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition.
Ransom Edition : : 11

ET CETERATA
This dress, worn
by Ann Miller in
Easter Parade,
is part of the
Ransom Center’s
film collection.
Ransom Edition : : 12
Ann Miller, born Johnnie Lucille Collier on April
12, 1923 in Houston, Texas, began dancing lessons when she was five
as part of her therapy from an attack of rickets. Her parents divorced
when she was 10, and Ann and her mother moved to Hollywood,
where Ann got jobs dancing in various clubs and playing bit parts in
movies while being home schooled.
In the late 1930s, Miller was booked at the Club Bal Tabarin in San
Francisco. Lucille Ball was in the audience one night and saw Ann
dance. She persuaded her agent to give Miller a screen test at RKO
Studios where Ball was also under contract. Ann was signed to a
seven-year contract (she was only 13 but lied and said she was 18).
She debuted as a featured dancer in New Faces of 1937 (1937).
Her next film, and first acting role, was Stage Door (1937), in which
she was cast alongside Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers. She
continued to act and dance in several low-budget features before
being loaned out to Columbia Pictures in 1938 for the role of the eccentric
Sycamore family’s fudge-making, ballet-dancing daughter in
You Can’t Take It With You, which won the Academy Award for best
picture of 1938. Miller asked to be let out of her contract with RKO
and soon headed to New York to appear in George White’s Scandals
on Broadway in 1939. Returning to Hollywood in 1940, she appeared
in a couple of films for Republic Pictures before signing with Columbia
Pictures in 1941, where she would star in a series of wartime musicals
and comedies.
(top) Ann Miller studio still
(above) Ann Miller and Peter Lawford in Easter Parade
When Cyd Charisse broke her leg, Ann auditioned for and won
the role of second female lead in MGM’s musical Easter Parade
(1948), which also starred Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, and Peter
Lawford. Her success in this film won Ann an MGM contract, and
she quickly became a member of Arthur Freed’s musical unit at
MGM, which included Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Judy
Garland, Vera-Ellen, Jane Powell, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin.
At MGM, she would make her best-remembered films, including On
the Town (1949) and Kiss Me Kate (1953). Her final film for MGM
was The Great American Pastime (1956) after which she retired
from film making.
Never out of the spotlight for long, Miller turned her attention to
television, nightclubs, and the stage. She was the last actress to
headline the Broadway production of Mame in 1969 and 1970.
In 1979, she and Mickey Rooney starred in the smash hit Sugar
Babies, in which she performed for nine years on Broadway and on
tour. Her last stage performance was in 1998 in Stephen Sondheim’s
Follies, in which she played the hardboiled survivor Carlotta
Campion, who sings the anthemic “I’m Still Here.” In 2001, she took
her last film role, playing Coco in director David Lynch’s Mulholland
Drive (2001). Ann Miller died January 22, 2004, in Los Angeles.
by Darnelle Vanghel

JULY
T h u r s d ay, J u ly 1 3 , 7 p. m .
S c r e e n i n g Luke Savisky premieres D/x, a live
projection piece using multiple projectors, along with
highlights from indoor and outdoor installation works.
Part of the Alternative Technologies Screening Series.
T h u r s d ay, J u ly 2 7, 7 p. m .
L e c t u r e Mark Van Stone presents The Interaction of Pen,
Paper, and Scribe: The Technical and Aesthetic Forces that
Shape our Letterforms.
Upcoming Exhibitions
Norman Mailer Takes On America
S e p t e m b e r 5 – D e c e m b e r 3 1 , 2 0 0 6
Drawing on the recently acquired Norman Mailer archive,
the exhibition will set the career of Norman Mailer in the
cultural context of post-World War II America and trace
the central role he has played in our awareness and
understanding of what Morris Dickstein calls the “shocks
of history, politics, and contemporary life” that reshaped
the last half of the twentieth century and continue to
unsettle the twenty-first.
Feliks Topolski: Portraits of Britain’s
Twentieth-Century Literary Greats
S e p t e m b e r 5 – D e c e m b e r 3 1 , 2 0 0 6
Feliks Topolski (1907–1989), painter, caricaturist, illustrator,
and muralist, chronicled many of the twentieth-century’s most
significant people and associated historical events. Born in
Poland and centered in London his entire creative career,
Topolski embraced modernism’s inventive freedoms but
worked at the edge of its mainstream, thanks in part to
his bold expressionist style that brought acclaim as well as
controversy.
This exhibition brings together, for the first time, all 20 paintings
from the original 1960 commission for a portrait series of
great living British writers and playwrights. The artist’s large
portrait of G. B. Shaw, illustrations for Shaw’s plays, and
selected broadsides from Topolski’s Chronicle, a twicemonthly
broadsheet published by the artist from 1953–1979,
are also included in the exhibition.
Image from Luke Savisky’s D/x.
Jean Cocteau (French, 1889–1963)
Holograph manuscript of Jean Cocteau practicing
his signature, not dated.
Norman Mailer’s character chart for
The Naked and the Dead.
Sir John Betjeman (1906–1984)
Oil on canvas, 1961
36 x 28 inches
© Trustees of the Feliks Topolski Estate
CALENDAR
TOURS EVERY SATURDAY at 2 P.M.
Take a free guided tour of the exhibitionsTechnologies of Writing and The Image
Wrought: Historical Photographic Approaches in the Digital Age through August 5th.
Ransom Edition : : 13

exploring
the ransom center
Above, Ransom Center Associate Curator of Photography Linda Briscoe Myers
teaches children how to create their own cyanotypes at Explore UT Day 2006.
More than 3,500 people visited the Ransom Center that day.
Since the completion of the renovation of the Ransom Center in 2003 and the
establishment of its vigorous public programming, more than 200 events have been
sponsored by the Center, from talks by Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo to eclectic
film screenings, from book signings to magic shows based on our collections.
Almost 30,000 people have attended these programs in the last three years.
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