You step onto the porch of the Harry Ransom Center and feel its history seep into your bones. This isn’t just a building; it’s a treasure chest overflowing with stories, whispering the secrets of the past. The Harry Ransom Center is a unique place that gathers together pieces of our collective imagination. It was founded in 1957, a dream by Harry Ransom to expand on the University of Texas’ rare books and manuscripts. He had big plans.
And he got them done. Over time, the center grew to house 36 million literary manuscripts, a million rare books, and five million photographs. It’s a veritable time capsule bursting with iconic artifacts. Among these are a Gutenberg Bible, a complete copy of which you could find in only twenty other places in the world, and the first successful photograph, ‘View from the Window at Le Gras.’
You’ll find Shakespeare’s First Folio and a suppressed first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland here. Even a writing journal once used by Jack Kerouac, the beat generation writer, full of notes in preparation for his most famous work, ‘On the Road.’ The Harry Ransom Center is a place for scholars and dreamers, artists and historians, to sift through the traces of the past and unlock the secrets of the future.