A magnum opus for Ransom

Austin, Texas


Even without a Texas nexus, it's an excellent fit: Magnum's huge archive of press prints—some predating the founding of the venerated photographers' cooperative in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others—has arrived at the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center here. (The archive was recently bought by the private investment firm of computer magnate Michael Dell; the Ransom Center will catalog and exhibit it for at least five years.) To reposition itself in today's digital marketplace, Magnum will use the funds realized from the two tractor trailers full of what it produced so well using old-school technology. The Ransom Center, having recently celebrated its own 50th anniversary, will continue doing what it only seems to get better at: collecting and preserving the paper trails of many media, including the materials just deaccessioned by Magnum.
deaccessioned: the process of legally removing objects from a repository/museum's collections.

 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos - 

Cartier-Bresson's 'Place de l'Europe. Gare Saint Lazare' (1932).

At last count, Ransom's large building on the UT campus houses 36 million manuscript pages, one million rare or significant books, five million photographs, and 10,000 objects, from Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish typewriter to the sunglasses Gloria Swanson wore in "Sunset Boulevard." While many of Ransom's 70,000 annual visitors come to gawk at its Gutenberg Bible (one of only 48 complete copies) or the first photograph taken in nature by Joseph Niepce in 1826, what places Ransom in the rarefied company of research libraries like Harvard's Houghton, Yale's Beinecke or the Library of Congress is the breadth and depth of its 20th-century British and American collections.

Most of the contents are accessible to anyone with an I.D. and a wish-list. Simply walk in and you can soon be rifling (carefully) through acid-free boxes of Tennessee Williams's papers, as Vanessa Redgrave did when she went searching for a certain previously unpublished, unproduced Williams play. Or you can have a look at Ezra Pound's copy of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," in which the poet scribbled "For E.P., miglior fabbro, from T.S.E."—the mold that grew on the inside cover is left as provenance; Pound buried it in Italy to protect it during the war.

The Ransom Center was named for its founder, Harry Huntt Ransom, an English professor and then university chancellor, who decided in the 1950s that Texas needed its own Bibliothèque Nationale. Rather than compete, so late in the game, for rare books with long-established libraries, Ransom took the unconventional tack of pursuing the prepublication manuscripts and archives of late-19th- and 20th-century British and American writers, for which little market then existed. (Not so now.) Flush with funds from university oil revenues, the "Great Acquisitor," as Ransom was called, snapped up the collections of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw, to name a few, as well as many nonliterary archives, such as that of theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, and 5,000 boxes of producer David O. Selznick's papers.

The Harry Ransom Center - The Magnum archives arrive at the Ransom Center.

Enter Thomas F. Staley, a James Joyce scholar, who took the helm of the Ransom Center in 1988, 12 years after Ransom's death. Among the 100 archives he's scored for the Ransom during his tenure are those of British playwrights Tom Stoppard, John Osborne, David Hare and Arnold Wesker, as well as those of writers David Mamet, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Penelope Lively and the Ransom's largest single-author collection, the 10-ton archive of Norman Mailer. Today most of the funding for Mr. Staley's acquisitions—including the $5 million tab in 2003 for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate papers and $2.5 million in 2005 for Mailer's—comes from the endowments of private sources he so adroitly cultivates. (As for the Magnum acquisition, MSD Capital, L.P. would not divulge the pricetag, but a source familiar with the transaction said the Ransom has insured it for more than $100 million.)

Affable, kinetic and with an impish sense of humor, the 74-year-old Mr. Staley conducts operations from an office whose decor and contents feel slightly at odds with the contemporary setting: rare books mingle in antique bookcases with Joyce journals and review copies of new books; the walls are covered with autographed memorabilia from the past century. An Eve Arnold photo of Marilyn Monroe, sitting in a playground reading "Ulysses," fairly leaps off the wall.


Mr. Staley typically looks at up to five collections a month, adding that while he "certainly could not imagine a Virginia Woolf doing this, more authors today are aware of the possibilities and try to negotiate their archives during their lifetimes because they need the money." Mr. Staley's ability to tap deep pockets—quickly—for an acquisition is legendary. As a result, he says, "we get a shot at many of them, the first-refusals."

Steve McCurry / Magnum
Steve McCurry's famous photo 'Pakistan. Peshawar. 1984. Afghan Girl at Nasir Bagh refugee camp' is part of the collection.

In a shrewd game of what he stresses is "chess, not checkers," Mr. Staley keeps three different tiers of authors on his radar screen, looking for those likely to be future subjects of literary scholarship. (A group of curatorial-minded younger readers scouts collectable younger talent.) He stays in personal touch and also monitors the writers' personal (read: financial) circumstances. He knows the dealers, is friends with many of the writers, and has terrific stories of hard-ball negotiations—successful or not—with an Osborne (who held out during his lifetime; his widow subsequently made the deal with Mr. Staley) or a Wesker (who made lunch for Mr. Staley at his home in Wales and showed him his archive, stored in a damp barn covered with plastic, in hopes of getting Mr. Staley to up his offer—he didn't). Mr. Staley also tells of the fun he had, in the early '90s, marshaling a "minyan" of Texans for the funds to "get I.B. Singer's archive out of New York."

More on Photography

Robert Adams's Heart of Darkness

He makes frequent forays to London and delights in the serendipity of stumbling upon a folder of moldy, mouse-nibbled Beckett and Harold Pinter letters while poking around Stoppard's barn, helping the playwright pack up his papers for Austin. But it would be hard to top his discovery, years ago, while inventorying a newly acquired collection of Joyce papers, of some onionskin leaves that Mr. Staley "realized were the famous lost link, the missing draft with Joyce's corrections in his own hand to the opening of 'Finnegans Wake'—an item more valuable than the price we had paid for the entire collection." This is empirical proof of Mr. Staley's axiom that "10% of an archive represents 90% of its value, and 90% of an archive is worth 10% of the price."

That great sucking sound made by the exodus of the papers of so many British writers from "over there" to here has understandably generated some push-back from across the pond, some going so far as to denounce it as "cultural vandalism." Others blame their own for simply lacking the cultural chutzpah of a Tom Staley.


Ms. Lewis writes about the arts for the Journal from Austin, Texas.
* ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
* MARCH 25, 2010


A Magnum Opus for Ransom
By Anne S. Lewis

Exodus to Jazz

Listening to Last.fm, Ben Webster & Oscar Peterson radio, Exodus by Eddie Harris came on. I have never heard the song, probably, other than in the movie. Curious, I took a look at his biography.

Eddie Harris (October 20, 1934 - November 5, 1996), was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Although he was one of the most popular jazz musicians of his day (and the first to receive a gold record), his inclusion in his repertoire of types of music other than jazz and his incorporation of comedy into his act led many jazz critics to consider him insufficiently committed to jazz. His experimentation with other types of music sometimes had questionable results, but many still regard him as one of the great jazz musicians.

 Insufficiently committed? What the hell do critics know? And how could they criticize a musician in such a way?

Beethoven the teacher

Saw an issue of the journal American Music Teacher being discarded, and this story caught my eye: Beethoven as teacher.

Paris Metro

Found this in my files, dated 10 April 2001. This is NOT the Metro stop near the hotel where we stayed in Paris.

Great Buildings Collection. Architect: Hector Guimard.

Songs for Kellys and Cohens

Aside from the teaming-up of Jews and Irish to write music, in this article in today's Journal I learned about musical instrument.

Last Wednesday on NBC's "Today" show, guest Mick Moloney sat calm, cool and collected. The pre-eminent authority on Irish music in America was there to amplify the correct answers to a "How 'Irish' Are You?" trivia contest conducted by co-hosts Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb. "I was quite impressed at the integrity of their little pop quiz," the professor of Irish studies and music at New York University told me later on the phone. "Besides, why pass up the chance to inform and entertain at the same time?"

Informing and entertaining are the hallmarks of Mr. Moloney's teaching, writing and music-making. His introductory course in Celtic music is consistently oversubscribed by NYU undergraduates; he wrote the widely praised book "Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish-American Immigration Through Song"; and he appears on more than 60 albums that showcase his compelling singing and virtuosity on guitar, mandolin, tenor banjo and octave mandolin.

Tenor banjo? Didn't know there  is such an instrument. This is an Antoria SB54 4 sting tenor banjo sold by an UK company I found on the web.

from Wiki: The banjo is a stringed instrument developed by enslavedAfricans in Colonial America, adapted from several African instruments. The name banjo is commonly thought to be derived from the Kimbundu term mbanza. Some etymologists derive it from a dialectal pronunciation of "bandore" or from an early anglicisation of the Spanish word "bandurria", though other research suggests that it may come from a Senegambian term for a bamboo stick formerly used for the instrument's neck. The article continues to differentiate the tenor from the plectrum banjo, it being shorter than the latter. There are alsofive and six string instruments (the plectrum and tenor have four), among others.

The octave mandolin is one of the mandolin instrument family.


But on two recent albums, "McNally's Row of Flats" and "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews" (both on Compass Records), Mr. Moloney took a diverting detour. "I first became aware of the late-19th-century songs of Ned Harrigan, whose grandfather was from Cork, in the home library of Kenny Goldstein," he said, referring to his late dissertation adviser at Penn. "As I learned more about those songs, I had a feeling similar to the one I had when I first encountered Irish traditional music. It was an emotional attachment that became part of me, and it became only stronger after I moved full time in 2004 from Philadelphia to Manhattan, where Harrigan and other songwriters did most of their work."

The title song of "McNally's Row of Flats," an album comprising 14 compositions by the theatrical songwriting team of Irish-American Harrigan and Jewish-American David Braham (his ancestral surname was Abraham), describes densely multiethnic tenement life on Manhattan's Lower East Side: "And it's Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany, / Chinese and Africans and a paradise for rats. / All jumbled up together in the snow and rainy weather / They constitute the tenants in McNally's row of flats." Written in 1882, the song uses lyricist Harrigan's gimlet-eyed, comic sensibility and Braham's catchy melody to give a sobering glimpse into a struggling stratum of New York at that time.

A name mentioned is Billy McComiskey. I know the name Comiskey, the Chicago White Sox player and owner, but had never heard the name with the Mc prefix.

Other terms that caught my eye were Uilleann pipes, and euphony ("Composers and performers often changed their names for euphony, to fit the musical fashion, or to avoid stereotyping.").

Chopin's 'Soul and Heart'

By BYRON JANIS

March 1 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great composer and pianist Frédéric François Chopin. Or was it? Not according to his sister Ludwika, Franz Liszt and Chopin's close friend Jules Fontana. They all said, at one time or another, that he was born on March 1, 1 809, despite Chopin's insisting his birthday was a year later. To add to the mystery, there is a birth certificate issued by the parish church in Brochów, Poland (and on display there to this day)—near Zelazowa Wola, the small town outside Warsaw where Chopin was born. It gives us still another date: Feb. 22, 1810, the same date inscribed on Polish monuments and on his burial site at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Getty Images - Portrait of Frederic Francois Chopin (1810 - 1849), Polish composer and pianist

Mr. Janis is a world-renowned concert pianist particularly known for his interpretations of Chopin. PBS will air a documentary about his life in October and J. Wiley will publish his memoirs in the fall.

Antonio Vivaldi

News results for Vivaldi

Telegraph.co.uk

Vivaldi is so this season, says Google‎ - 1 hour ago Vivaldi's 332nd birthday is marked today by a Google doodle. Here are three reasons why he's immortal Everyone should have their 332nd birthday marked by a ...