Also in Austin, an unsung museum

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 21, 1996 | by Charles Sipe

Could Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of legendary sleuth Sherlock Holmes, have intuited that his iron-rimmed spectacles one day would end up in Austin, Texas? Here they are, along with original scores by Ravel and Debussy, photographs of Harry Houdini and a hand-scripted copy of Dante's Divine Comedy dated 1363.

These are only samples of the vast treasures held in the Harry Ransom Center, or HRC, at the University of Texas, a cross between the Library of Congress and a wax museum. The museum was the idea of Harry Huntt Ransom, a university vice president who in 1958 proposed a "Biblioteque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation."

When Ransom established the center, he incorporated an existing rare-book collection with 19th- and 20th-century manuscripts and memorabilia. "He knew he couldn't compete with the holdings of more established libraries that took years to gather their collections," public-information officer Jean Claude van Ryzen tells Insight. "So he focused on the collections of modern artists and, in effect, virtually created the market."

In Ransom's view, anything pertaining to an artist's life could yield a greater understanding of the creative process. Though the HRC is renowned mostly in scholarly circles for its importance in research, it also is a vast archive of surprises. Among the items on display: Rudyard Kipling's childhood toys and poet Anne Sexton's checkbook. Comments a visitor from Arizona, "Seeing these possessions give you a sense of who these artists were in real life, how they lived -- it's really fascinating stuff."

Any tour of the HRC must start with its most famous possession, a Gutenberg Bible, one of only 48 in existence. Upstairs in the photography center, there's the world's first photograph, produced in 1826 by Frenchman Joseph Nicephore Niepce -- a view of his estate at Gras. Want to know more about Earle Stanley Gardner, creator of prosecutor Perry Mason? The museum houses an exact replica of his study in Rancho de Paisano, Calif., complete with his 3,000volume legal library

The Ransom Center is first and foremost a bona fide scholarly research facility, emphasizes director Thomas F. Staley, but it is hoping to entice more visitors outside the academic community. "I've been here years and, up until last spring, I didn't know this place existed," admits a UT student. The HRC has stepped up its "outreach" efforts: It now has Web site at http://www.lib. utexas.ecu./Libs/HRC/HRHRC/.