Ransom Center Magazine

Books + Manuscripts

“The Attempt to Keep Day and Night Together”

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An interview with Dean F. Echenberg on his war poetry collection

The Ransom Center is the new home for the Dean F. Echenberg War Poetry collection, a collection of more than 6,500 volumes of poetry related to people’s experiences with war. The collection was begun in the early 1970s by Dr. Echenberg, a flight surgeon during the Vietnam War who later served as an emergency room staff physician in Detroit Receiving Hospital, worked in private family practice, and served as Director of Disease Control in San Francisco during the first years of the AIDS crisis. [Read more…] about “The Attempt to Keep Day and Night Together”

A baroness and her bookshelves in an English parish church

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In May, the Ransom Center acquired two volumes of Ambrose’s Opera (or Works) in Latin. The edition was published in Basel in 1567. What is most compelling about these particular books, however, is less the writings of the Church Father, as such, and more their story as books.  [Read more…] about A baroness and her bookshelves in an English parish church

Public has access to archive of Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro

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The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin holds the archive of novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature for 2017. [Read more…] about Public has access to archive of Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro

Coming out of the archives

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Coming Out of the Archives is a selection of materials curated by students in my spring 2017 Queer Archives class. The materials can be seen in the Ransom Center’s Stories to Tell exhibition that features rotating highlights from the collections. [Editor’s note: the items are no longer on view, as the display cases have rotated] [Read more…] about Coming out of the archives

A nomad’s writing finds a home

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Q&A with Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje began his career as a poet but is best known as the author of the 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient, which was made into a critically-acclaimed motion picture. He was born in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in 1943; he moved to Canada at age 18. [Read more…] about A nomad’s writing finds a home

Instructions for reading aloud in the Gutenberg Bible

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As many readers of this blog will know, Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust’s Biblia latina (Mainz, 1454–1455) represents the first substantial book printed from moveable type on a printing press. Without question, it is a milestone in information technology. And yet, it is important to remember that [Read more…] about Instructions for reading aloud in the Gutenberg Bible