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boxes of Tennessee Williams's papers, as Vanessa Redgrave did when she went searching for a certain previously unpublished, unproduced Williams play.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
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