The Ransom Center has its own unique history of collecting. Its holdings of Jane Austen offer a single-author window onto the evolution of modern collecting practices during the past half century. The Ransom Center, learning of my research, gave me the opportunity to curate their Jane Austen materials to tell the story of modern collecting in a special exhibition titled Austen in Austin. In 1957, when the Harry Ransom Center was founded, first editions of major writers were an acquisition priority for a library with world-class aspirations. Soon, the Ransom Center owned an enviable number of Jane Austen’s novels as rare firsts. Then, and as great writers are great readers, all manner of Austen copies began to arrive among the books and papers of other authors. Elsewhere, such unexpected “duplicates” of titles already owned in loftier editions might have been culled, but the Ransom Center held on to these books. Lucky for us, because these incidental catches of Austen now track her influence on other writers and artists.
The Austen in Austin section of the Stories to Tell gallery irreverently mixes high-value and low-value items from the Ransom Center collections. There are plenty of jaw-dropping first editions as well as a surprisingly large number of Austen family books. But there are also ordinary reprints made extraordinary by former owners plus rare commonplace versions of Austen’s novels, not the traditional stuff of collecting, that entered the Ransom Center as part of other scholarly archives or projects. Austen in Austin is on view through Feb. 2, 2020.
https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2019/09/26/why-are-some-books-collected-and-others-merely-read/?fbclid=IwAR0LltaQRbDqZwh1bLItKTan7_xu3Quke1xDEymKJJya8IRmNgvYIM8PGIc
