Ransom Center Magazine

About Aaron Pratt

Pratt oversees research, access, and interpretation of the Ransom Center’s pre-1700 books and manuscripts. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Yale University, with specializations in the literature and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bibliography, and the history of the book.

A childhood gift inspires a lifelong passion for India and map-collecting

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Charting a Path

Sixty maps and other prints of South Asia and the surrounding region have recently arrived at the Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin in honor of former professor Susan G. Hadden. Generously donated by her husband, James Hadden, Jr., the newly acquired Susan G. Hadden Collection of Early Maps of India contains maps dating from 1540 to around 1880, and together they track developments in cartography and the rise of European trade, colonization, and ultimately empire in the region.

The Hadden collection’s earliest map is a two-page woodcut that was printed as part of Sebastian Münster’s Geographia (Basel, 1540), a Latin version of Ptolemy’s widely printed and adapted Geography. It is the first printed map dedicated to illustrating the Asian continent as a whole. In it, only four cities within India have been identified, all on the western coast, all sites of early Portuguese settlement and/or trade.

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A Rare Gift: First-edition Principia highlights extraordinary collection

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The Ransom Center recently received a generous donation from the James M. Vaughn, Jr., Vaughn Foundation Fund of important books in the history of mathematics. The earliest volumes supplement the Center’s existing strength in early materials on the history of science and mathematics, and others productively expand the range of authors, topics, and periods represented in our collections.

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Learning how to read again

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This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation. 

Part of what is so compelling about doing research with old books is that the learning curve never ends—there’s always some new challenge, another thing to explain, something else to get to the bottom of.

Reading old books is hard. Even if a book isn’t that old, content regularly poses challenges: who is that historical figure, what on earth is this political debate about, is this supposed to be a joke? And if the book is from more than a century or so ago, determining the meaning of basic nouns, verbs, and idioms can be tough, too. If you’re reading a manuscript or early printed edition in a place like the Ransom Center or working with a digital facsimile of one from your couch, you’re also likely to face different typographical conventions, alien styles of handwriting, and unfamiliar abbreviations. [Read more…] about Learning how to read again

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