Articles

Frank Shay’s shop at 4 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village was a bookstore, a community gathering place, a circulating library, and a tiny publishing house all at once. Shay published a newspaper, a magazine, and more than a dozen books from the shop during his time there: small, handcrafted editions… read more 

Bethany Johnsen is an undergraduate intern at the Ransom Center who has been working with Cline Curator of Literature Molly Schwartzburg to gather materials for students for a visit on Halloween. For the students in University of Texas at Austin English Professor Janine Barchas’s freshman honors seminar, a Ransom Center… read more 

On May 10, 1933, a series of coordinated book burnings took place across Germany. In the academic sphere, the German Students Association’s staged burnings were an attempt to eliminate “un-German” works from university libraries. Addressing the students gathered in Berlin, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels encouraged them to “clean up the… read more 

In 1923, Edna St. Vincent Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1921). That prize-winning book was an expanded commercial edition of the poems in this volume. The longer book was published by Harper and Brothers and contained these poems, another poem published… read more 

Upon its publication in 1934, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was deemed obscene by the United States Customs Department and was not legally available in the United States. Editions like this one, published in Japan, were smuggled into the U.S. to satisfy demand. Miller had been seeking an American publisher… read more