Book People | January 2010 | Brian Cassidy

Harry Ransom Center's YouTube (?!) Channel

The University of Texas at Austin's famed Harry Ransom Center (surprisingly?) has an excellent YouTube channel I just stumbled across. They've been posting a few short videos a month for about a year, and the results are - for bibliophiles at least - eminently watchable. As expected, many of the videos highlight important or interesting collections, such as the Robert DeNiro or Harry Houdini Collections, or focus on the history of the Center itself. But my favorite clips are the brief interviews with scholars who have actually used the collections at the Ransom. From academics studying 80's blockbuster script doctors to others working with Samuel Beckett's manuscripts, these shorts are a testament to the enduring importance of the book as object.

Here's one of my favorites, Christine Ferguson enthusiastically discussing the Spiritualism movement and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: