#Minion stuart college archive
I recently went with him to a penthouse apartment in Miami, to look at a large archive of experimental poetry that had been collected by a pulmonologist, Marvin Sackner, and his wife, Ruth. He has coined several maxims about the acquisition of archives, including what he calls Staley’s Law: “Ten per cent of an archive represents ninety per cent of its value.” When he tells you about an archive that he is hoping to buy, he stops and purrs, “Oooh, it’s good, it’s very gooood,” his hill-country accent making him sound like a feline Lyndon Johnson. As you walk down the corridor leading to Staley’s office, you hear his cackling laugh. The bookshelves hold copies of Staley’s many scholarly publications before becoming an archivist, he wrote studies of Dorothy Richardson, the first writer to use stream-of-consciousness narration in English, and of Jean Rhys, the author of “Wide Sargasso Sea.” He was a founder of the James Joyce Quarterly, and was its editor for twenty-six years. A bronze bust of Joyce, by Milton Hebald, is in the foyer. Staley works from behind an oak desk in a large office on the Ransom’s third floor. “They like success.” (After the Ransom bought its Gutenberg Bible, the center sent the Bible on a victory lap, displaying it at libraries, museums, and universities around the state.) “People take a special pride here in winners,” Staley says. It operates more like a college sports team, with Staley as the coach-an approach that fits the temperament of Texas. The Ransom Center, under Staley’s leadership, easily outmaneuvers rivals such as Yale, Harvard, and the British Library.
#Minion stuart college professional
His “crafty pitch,” as he calls it, was good enough to attract the attention of professional scouts. In college, at a Jesuit school in Colorado, Staley pitched in a summer baseball league, specializing in a slow, sinking curve. Amid the silence of the center’s Reading Room, he often greets visiting scholars with a resonant slap on the back. Seventy-one, and a modernist scholar by training, he is mercurial and hard-driving.
The current director of the center is Thomas Staley. E.” Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of “Comus,” containing corrections in Milton’s own hand? Or the manuscript for “The Green Dwarf,” a story that Charlotte Brontë wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of “Ulysses,” on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center’s archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.
It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles a rare first edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed one of Jack Kerouac’s spiral-bound journals for “On the Road” and Ezra Pound’s copy of “The Waste Land,” in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: “For E.
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron’s curly brown hair. Tom Staley at the Ransom Center archives.
0 kommentar(er)
