Booksellers Rebecca Romney and Bill Cotter join the Ransom Center's Dr. Aaron T. Pratt to discuss current trends in the rare book trade. Learn which old books are most attractive to today's collectors and take a behind-the-curtain look at some of the business strategies that keep antiquarian bookselling profitable in 2023.

Selling Very Old Books Today

Explore the stories behind books published by Europeans between the mid-fifteenth and late-seventeenth centuries, tracing them from printing houses into the hands of generations of collectors and bookbinders and, ultimately, modern research libraries like the Ransom Center.

Harry Ransom Center: The Long Lives of Very Old Books

Here's an evening with award-winning playwrights Emily Mann and Robert Schenkkan, in celebration of their archives' arrival at the Harry Ransom Center. This intimate discussion will delve into their storied careers, the evolving landscape of American theatre, and the creative challenges and opportunities in the wake of COVID-19 closures.

Emily Mann, Robert Schenkkan, and the Future of Theatre

In this talk, Ohio State's Alan B. Farmer, builds on recent advances in estimating the numbers of lost books to consider how lost books might reshape our view of the early modern English book trade and the cultural history of England from the mid-16th to the mid-17th century.

Alan B. Farmer: Lost Books, the Dark Matter of the Early Modern English Book Trade

Explore the stories behind books published by Europeans between the mid-15th and late 17th centuries, tracing them from printing houses into the hands of generations of collectors and bookbinders and, ultimately, modern research libraries like the Ransom Center.

Featuring collaborations between fine presses and artists, examples of typographic and concrete poetry, and experimentations in pop and surrealism, the exhibition puts prints by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ed Ruscha in conversation with works by Charles Henri Ford, Kristin Calhoun, David McGee, and others.

Harry Ransom Center: Art In Words

See displays from landmark American and British theatre productions from the past century, bringing together the iconic work of writers Adrienne Kennedy, Arthur Miller, Robert Schenkkan, Tennessee Williams, and others – with award-winning designs from artists Boris Aronson, Beowulf Boritt, Jo Mielziner, and Norman Bel Geddes.

Words Into Worlds: Creating Place in the Theatre

This exhibition showcases the career of Works Progress Administration artist and author-illustrator Elizabeth Olds.

WPA: Elizabeth Olds

We’re thinking, with our own personal wetware, that the Harry Ransom Center’s jam-packed stronghold, replete with world-class collections of documents and artifacts from all over, is the perfect venue for hosting this talk by Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. Kahle’s magnum opus, begun in 1996, preserves more than 99 unique petabytes of data – the books, web pages, music, television, and software of our modern cultural heritage – and works with library and university partners around the world to create a digital library that’s accessible to all. – Wayne Alan Brenner

Digital Libraries for Thinking Machines

Art conservation can be a contradiction: to destroy to preserve. Thus it is with the HRC and its efforts to restore the Clarkson Stanfield album, one of the most remarkable volumes in the history of art photography. More correctly known as “100 Calotypes by D. O. Hill, R.S.A., and R. Adamson,” the collection of over 100 salted paper prints was collated by the photographers for landscape artist Stanfield and depicts the lords, laborers, clergy, and scientists of 19th-century Scotland and the landscapes in which they lived. Currently undergoing repairs, the center staff are using its deconstructed state to display 39 plates, along with more works from Hill and Adamson, as separate works since the first time they were bound. – Richard Whittaker

Hill & Adamson: The Clarkson Stanfield Album

Minneapolis-born and -raised, Elizabeth Olds lived to a sturdy 94 but didn’t get the attention she deserved in her lifetime. The Harry Ransom Center’s new exhibit, which opened Feb. 3 and runs through July 14, aims to rectify that with a first-of-its-kind look back at more than 100 of her prints, paintings, drawings, and illustrations from the 1920s to the 1960s. Of particular note: her depictions of social and political change from her time as a Works Progress Administration printmaker. Want to go deeper? Drop in for one of the daily docent tours. – Kimberley Jones