Ransom Center Magazine

About Edgar Walters

Walters was an undergraduate intern who majored in Plan II Honors, focusing on American Literature, World War II History, and German Language.

From the Outside In: “Transept of the Crystal Palace,” Benjamin Brecknell Turner, March 1852

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The atria on the first floor of the Ransom Center are surrounded by windows featuring etched reproductions of images from the collections. The windows offer visitors a hint of the cultural treasures to be discovered inside. From the Outside In is a series that highlights some of these images and their creators.

 

This image captures the dramatic scale of the Crystal Palace, built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first international world’s fair. It was the largest glass building at the time, covering 990,000 square feet of Hyde Park in the middle of London, and so tall that it could enclose whole elm trees. The photograph was taken at the end of the exhibition, before the palace was dismantled and rebuilt in the suburb Sydenham, south of the city, as an even grander permanent exhibition space.

 

The Great Exhibition had been envisioned by Prince Albert to show off the wonders of British technology, and the Crystal Palace itself was one of the greatest wonders on show. Designing a building to house the more than 14,000 exhibits of the Exhibition had been a long and difficult process. Until the planning committee accepted Joseph Paxton’s winning design in July 1850, they had rejected every submitted proposal as too expensive to build, in addition to a design that they themselves had created and that had been ridiculed by the press. Paxton was one of the most respected gardeners in the United Kingdom and had ample experience creating large greenhouses. His Crystal Palace design took advantage of a newly invented process for mass-producing sheet glass. Held together by cast iron supports, 900,000 square feet of glass were used to create a modular structure at a cost less than half of many of the other designs. The modular design also allowed Paxton to make changes as needed; the transept in this picture was specially created to enclose a line of elms that otherwise would have been cut down. The final structure was 72 feet wide, more than 1,800 feet (six football fields) long, and up to 100 feet high, but Paxton was able to construct it on budget in only five months, in time for the opening of the exhibition on May 1, 1851.

 

Among its other attractions, the exhibition included one of the first large-scale displays of photographs anywhere in the world: over 700 photographs from six different countries. Photographer Benjamin Brecknell Turner was likely one of the people who saw these photos. In 1852, he photographed the Crystal Palace with a large-field camera, creating some of the most dramatic architectural compositions of the Victorian Age. Turner had gained a license to use William Fox Talbot’s calotype technique in 1849, and he preferred to use this method for all of his large-scale 30 x 40 centimeter paper negatives from then on. With his new camera, he was able to capture the Crystal Palace in striking detail, and he became one of the pioneers of photography’s early era.

 

This image forms a part of the Ransom Center’s Gernsheim collection, which documents the history of photography from the First Photograph (ca. 1826) until the 1960s.

 

Ransom Center volunteer Emilio Englade wrote this post.

 

Image: From the original calotype paper negative of “Transept of the Crystal Palace,” Benjamin Brecknell Turner, March 1852.

Conservation team brings large map to larger audiences

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The Ransom Center’s archives are full of treasures waiting to be pulled off the shelves. But once paged from the stacks, some of those treasures prove difficult to handle.

Such was the case with Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s enormous 1786 print “Pianta delle Fabriche Esistenti Nella villa Adriana.” The 10-foot wide map of Hadrian’s villa is a popular item at the Ransom Center, but its impressive size complicates the process of sharing it with students and scholars. Now, thanks to treatment efforts undertaken by Ransom Center conservators, the map is far more accessible.

Previously, a complex set of folds allowed the print to fit, attached to a stiff paper stub, inside its book. The setup was not optimal: long-term folds left significant creases in the print, and the stub attachment was unwieldy and damaging.

The conservation team had a better idea. Conservators cut the map away from its stub and carefully unfolded the map onto a large work surface, where it was cleaned of superficial dust and grime. The creases were relaxed by a textile humidifier and then flattened under a weighted drying system. Conservators also mended small tears in the print using long-fibered Japanese paper and wheat starch paste.

Next, Heather Hamilton, Head of Paper Conservation, was tasked with creating a modified tube around which the print could be rolled. Her objective was to eliminate the need for folding, thus protecting the item from potentially harmful creases. Given the print’s large size, a standard tube would be too large to house on a shelf within the stacks. Hamilton’s answer was to roll the map onto a flattened, space-saving pad.

The pad consists of four layers. A corrugated board forms the core, which is then wrapped in thick foam. An outer layer of soft, thin Volara foam envelops the interior, which is cocooned by airplane cotton just below an exterior cloth surface. Hamilton used a giant needle to sew through the many layers, ensuring that everything was well-secured.

Finally, Preservation Housing Manager Apryl Voskamp created a custom archival box to house the print and its pad. The new lidded box has a layer of protective Volara foam and a drop front, which allows the print to slide out easily without risk of harm.

The map of Hadrian’s villa is frequently used by classes in the University’s School of Architecture, where students learn the importance of structure and accessibility. Applying those same concepts, Ransom Center conservators have brought new life to the map of Hadrian’s villa.

Please click the thumbnails below to view full-size images.

Mark Twain letter has close geographical tie to University of Texas

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When Samuel Clemens—better known by his pseudonym Mark Twain—penned a letter in London in 1900 to the widow of his childhood best friend in Austin, he had no idea that it would be preserved more than a century later in the Harry Ransom Center’s archives just four blocks south. Today the letter resides in a collection of Twain-related materials that features correspondence with longtime friends and others, including one from Clemens to P. T. Barnum.

This letter’s addressee, Mrs. Dora Goff Bowen, lived at 2506 Whitis Ave. in a neighborhood just north of the burgeoning University of Texas campus. The address, now home to The University of Texas at Austin’s hulking Jesse H. Jones Communications Center, has an interesting past. A few years after Clemens wrote the letter, 2506 Whitis became the site of one of the University’s first sorority houses, that of the newly organized Pi Beta Phi chapter. Two lots down the street lay George Littlefield’s still-new Victorian mansion, built in 1893, which maintains a grandiose presence on campus to this day.

Dora’s husband, Will Bowen, had grown up with Clemens in Hannibal, Missouri. Their friendship and escapades along the Missouri River became the basis of Twain’s books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Bowen and Clemens engaged in countless hijinks, including, as another letter reveals, stealing dinner from the town drunkard to feed “the hogs in order to keep them still till we could mount them & have a ride.”

Clemens’s letter to Mrs. Bowen begins abruptly: “Yes, I really wanted to catch the measles. I succeeded.” The statement refers to another episode of Will Bowen and Clemens’s childhood mischief. When a young Bowen came down with the measles, Clemens decided to join his friend in bed to catch the virus and “settle this matter one way or the other and be done with it,” as he revealed in a posthumously published autobiography.

But fans will notice in the letter a conspicuous absence of Twain’s characteristic humor and lightheartedness. The turn of the twentieth century was a difficult time in Clemens’s life. Will Bowen, with whom Clemens had been in correspondence for more than 30 years, had recently passed away. Shortly thereafter, in 1896, Clemens’s daughter Suzy died of meningitis. Around the same time, Clemens was forced to declare bankruptcy after investing $300,000—worth approximately $8,000,000 today—in the Paige typesetting machine, a dysfunctional technology that quickly became obsolete.

Those hardships are reflected in the melancholy tone of Clemens’s letter: “[T]he romance of life is the only part of it that is overwhelmingly valuable, & romance dies with youth. After that, life is a drudge, & indeed a sham. A sham, & likewise a failure.” He fantasizes an alternate timeline, in which he would rather “call back Will Bowen & John Garth & the others, & live the life, & be as we were, & make holiday until 15, then all drown together.”

Despite his apparently bleak outlook, Clemens insists in the letter that he does not “say this uncheerfully—for I have seldom been uncheerful.” Indeed, in a post-script, he indulges in some characteristic playfulness in his response to Mrs. Bowen’s previous letter: “P.S. What we did to Brown? Oh, no, I will never reveal that!”

Please click the thumbnails below to view full-size images.

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