LETTER FROM AUSTIN - FINAL DESTINATION

The Harry Ranson Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains 36 million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects including a lock of Byron's curly brown hair.

It houses one of the 48 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 has scribbled his famous dedication, "For E.P.,miglior fabbro, from T.S.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 Bronte wrote in miniscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made in to a book for her siblings. Or the corrected proofs of Ulysses, on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel.

Read the full story of this astonishing archive which appeared in The New Yorker dated June 11 & 18.