Ríete de los rednecks

¿Sabes donde van a parar todos los manuscritos, notas y correspondencia de los principales autores de la literatura?

¿Londres?

¿París?

¿Berlín?

Pues no, los encontrarás en Austin, Texas.

En la universidad de Texas hay el archivo del Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center donde llevan años comprando a autores, herederos y coleccionistas los documentos donde se detallan las creaciones de las principales obras de la literatura universal.

En este artículo del New Yorker nos detallan como funciona esto de comprar y conservar tales documentos poniendo como ejemplo a Don Delillo (sí, compran documentos de autores en vida).

Aquí tienes una muestra de lo que tienen los rednecks:

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. 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. 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 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.