When William B. Todd stepped up to the dais on March 25 at the Ransom Center to present the fifth annual Pforzheimer Lecture, there was no evidence that he dragged his impossibly stuffy title behind him: He’s the Mildred Caldwell and Baine Perkins Kerr Centennial Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. I attended the lecture in part to see what someone who bears a title like that looks like, but was pleasantly surprised by the fact that Todd is much more like one of those slightly eccentric, thoroughly charming, and eminently approachable English dons than his title lets on. If Todd’s utter lack of grandiloquence was pleasing, neither did he disappoint in his fascinating revelations of literary adventure at the HRC. In 1958, Harry Ransom was the new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UT and a “most gracious and ever persistent official” according to Todd, who was brought to the HRC “by special edict” (that’s Ransom’s edict) after a stint as a research officer at Harvard’s Houghton Library. “From the start, in 1958, I understood that my role in the HRC was primarily to investigate and, wherever practicable, enhance or exploit collections of the 18th and earlier centuries,” Todd said. “Shortly after assuming this responsibility, however, I found it expedient to amend or suppress certain attitudes, especially my annoying habit of remarking how things were done, and done better, at Harvard — a litany not joyously received by patriotic Texans.” Upon arrival, Todd took inventory of the library’s 18th-century holdings “and was there immediately repulsed” because, for some mysterious reason, the HRC holdings disappeared after the midcentury mark. Thus, Todd found no first edition of Tom Jones(1749), no first edition of Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778), the first successful work by a female novelist, and “no trace either of the crown jewel at the end of the century, Robert Burns’ Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786).” Todd eventually realized that anything of note after Alexander Pope’s death was not to be found at the HRC and then realized that Professor R.H. Griffith, a particular devotee of Pope, was to blame for these lacunae. “Now the modernists among us may insist that there is much more life after Pope’s time, indeed whole centuries of exciting and abundant life, but for Professor Griffith all literary activity apparently ceased with Pope’s decease on 30 May 1744,” Todd remarked. (To read more HRC history, see Nicholas Basbanes’ A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books, recently issued in paperback from Owl Books, $18.95.) And don’t miss the HRC’s annual Book Sale on Friday, April 16 and Saturday, April 17; over 6,000 volumes will be for sale at prices ranging from 50� to $100.
New Columns
This week on page 43 we re-introduce a column that has appeared in various forms in the Chronicle throughout the existence of the Books section. It’s Off the Bookshelf and it consists of short reviews that are meant to provide brief but insightful glimpses of recently published books. We call it Off the Bookshelf because when books arrive at the paper, they’re placed in bookshelves for reviewers, who run off with them. The other column is Local Bestsellers, and it highlights what Austinites are reading; one of eight local stores’ list will be featured each week. This week’s list is from Toad Hall. It’s not true that I chose it to run first because I was so eager to see the words Moo Baa LaLaLa and Captain Underpants printed in the Books section.
This article appears in April 9 • 1999 and April 9 • 1999 (Cover).