Harry Ransom Center. The Harry Ransom Center is an archive, library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the collection of literary and cultural artifacts from the Americas and Europe for the purpose of advancing the study of the arts and humanities.
The Ransom Center houses 36 million literary manuscripts, one million rare books, five million photographs, and more than 100,000 works of art. The center has a reading room for scholars and galleries which display rotating exhibitions of works and objects from the collections.
In the 2015-16 academic year, the center hosted nearly 6,000 research visits resulting in the publication of over 145 books. Harry Ransom founded the Humanities Research Center in 1957 with the ambition of expanding the rare books and manuscript holdings of the University of Texas.
He acquired the Edward Alexander Parsons Collection, the T. Edward Hanley Collection, and the Norman Bel Geddes Collection. Ransom was only the official director of the center from 1958 to 1961, but he directed and presided over a period of great expansion in the collections until his resignation in 1971 as chancellor of the University of Texas System.
The center moved into its current building in 1972. F. Warren Roberts was the official director from 1961 to 1976 and acquired the Helmut Gernsheim Collection of photographs, the archives of D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, an