Willie Nelson may have spent much of his life on the road, but a good part of his artistic remains will rest forever in Texas, thanks to a donation by the singer to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin.
The donation includes a major part of the singer’s personal collection, including posters, platinum records, signed books, screenplays and posters, and letters and photographs from figures including Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, Bill Clinton and Ann Richards. There are also personal items like Indian headdresses and spirit catchers, along with numerous gifts and tributes from fans.
The Nelson collection, which will be opened to scholars after processing, joins the Briscoe Center’s substantial musical holdings, which include some 50,000 field and commercial recordings, the John A. Lomax Family Papers, and the archives of the Armadillo World Headquarters, a concert venue in Austin where Mr. Nelson, still relatively clean shaven, made his first appearance in 1972.
… a book is its text. A book is a unique string of words, as good as its bits.
But printed books are also objects, manufactured objects, owned objects, objects that have been marked by pencils and time and coffee cups and the oils from our skin. “A book is more than a bag of words,” the project’s founder, University of Virginia’s Andrew Stauffer, told me. “These books as objects have a lot to tell us.”
In the Middle Ages, books were incredibly scarce, and although many wanted to share knowledge with the masses, they didn’t quite trust the public. So the chained library was born, and while most of these restrained reading collections have vanished, a rare few still exist, looking much as they did centuries ago.
[W]hile paper books might be harder to distribute, they have one huge advantage over ebooks: as long as an archivist or collector can keep them from falling apart, they’ll be as readable in a century as they will in a year. Keeping ebooks in the historical record is harder. How do you preserve something that can’t be locked in an archive, sold in a secondhand bookstore, or even converted to a new format without first navigating an arcane copyright system?
If you missed the WCC Adler Planetarium Trip, have no fear, the Todd Library has a month long book display on Astronomy. Remember Spring Astronomy Week is May 5th – 11th as well. Come and check it out.
A look at the news and events happening in the Libraries at Waubonsee Community College
