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.

Tom Staley at the Ransom Center archives. Photograph by Dan Winters.

The current director of the center is Thomas Staley. Seventy-one, and a modernist scholar by training, he is mercurial and hard-driving. Amid the silence of the center’s Reading Room, he often greets visiting scholars with a resonant slap on the back. In college, at a Jesuit school in Colorado, Staley pitched in a summer baseball league, specializing in a slow, sinking curve. His “crafty pitch,” as he calls it, was good enough to attract the attention of professional scouts. The Ransom Center, under Staley’s leadership, easily outmaneuvers rivals such as Yale, Harvard, and the British Library. It operates more like a college sports team, with Staley as the coach—an approach that fits the temperament of Texas. “People take a special pride here in winners,” Staley says. “They like success.” (After the Ransom bought its Gutenberg Bible, the center sent the Bible on a victory lap, displaying it at libraries, museums, and universities around the state.)

Staley works from behind an oak desk in a large office on the Ransom’s third floor. A bronze bust of Joyce, by Milton Hebald, is in the foyer. The bookshelves hold copies of Staley’s many scholarly publications; before becoming an archivist, he wrote studies of Dorothy Richardson, the first writer to use stream-of-consciousness narration in English, and of Jean Rhys, the author of “Wide Sargasso Sea.” He was a founder of the James Joyce Quarterly, and was its editor for twenty-six years. As you walk down the corridor leading to Staley’s office, you hear his cackling laugh.

He has coined several maxims about the acquisition of archives, including what he calls Staley’s Law: “Ten per cent of an archive represents ninety per cent of its value.” When he tells you about an archive that he is hoping to buy, he stops and purrs, “Oooh, it’s good, it’s very gooood,” his hill-country accent making him sound like a feline Lyndon Johnson. I recently went with him to a penthouse apartment in Miami, to look at a large archive of experimental poetry that had been collected by a pulmonologist, Marvin Sackner, and his wife, Ruth. Shortly after arriving, Staley pronounced it a “solid collection.” Upon examining some work in detail—the collection included the 1897 journal in which Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “A Throw of the Dice” first appeared—he began to snuffle with excitement. After spending an hour with the archive, Staley declared it to be “one hell of a collection.” He told me this outside, so that the Sackners wouldn’t raise the price.

From his office in Austin, Staley keeps tabs on writers who interest him—e-mailing and writing to them about their plans for their papers. To him, the world is a map of treasures whose locations he already knows. His eyes are fixed equally on the aging British literary couple (who are moving to a smaller house, now that the children are grown) and the Pulitzer-nominated phenom (who thinks that his inclusion in the same archive as Graham Greene will help cement his stature). Staley can wait years for the right moment to make a bid. “It’s chess, not checkers,” he likes to say. “You have to think ahead.” Once, he put a woman he thought was dating Cormac McCarthy on the Ransom’s advisory board in the hope—vain, as it turned out—that it would prompt the reclusive author to sell his papers. Gene Cooke, an investor who is an old friend and tennis partner of Staley’s, says, “You can always tell if Tom’s ahead or not. When he’s winning, it’s Hopkins.” (Staley will recite “The Windhover”: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon.”) “When he’s losing, it’s Milton.” (Staley likes to quote from “L’Allegro”: “Hence loathèd Melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born.”)

During Staley’s two decades in the job, he has bought nearly a hundred literary collections—including papers of Jorge Luis Borges, John Osborne, Julian Barnes, Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard, Penelope Fitzgerald, John Fowles, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Don DeLillo—and, as he moves toward retirement, his buys are getting bigger. In 2003, Texas bought the Watergate papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for five million dollars. (A sealed file revealing the then secret identity of Deep Throat, Mark Felt, was deposited at a trustee’s office in Washington.) In 2005, Staley paid two and a half million dollars for the collection of Norman Mailer, which included twenty-five thousand of Mailer’s letters, along with the identification tags of his late poodle, Tibo. The archive—weighing twenty thousand pounds in all—came to the center in a tractor trailer. The New York book dealer Glenn Horowitz, who brokered the two deals, says of Staley, “He’s looking for projects that have a culminating quality to them.”

Staley has a gift for finding a way to buy archives that appeal to him. “I spend half my time raising money,” he says. Whereas most archives take years to amass the money for an acquisition, Staley lined up donors for the Mailer collection in a few months. “We are able to respond with alacrity to an offer,” Staley says. “A lot of things come to us because the owners know they will get a prompt answer. If we don’t want it, then they can try somewhere else.”

There is not much that other institutions can do when Texas is interested. After Osborne, Stoppard, Penelope Lively, and others sold their papers to Texas, the mass departure aroused alarm in Britain—a 2005 headline in the London Times proclaimed, “WRITERS UNITE TO FIGHT FLIGHT OF LITERARY PAPERS TO U.S.” To counter the Ransom Center, Britain’s national-heritage fund changed a rule prohibiting public money from being spent on material less than twenty years old; the exclusion was reduced to ten years. The change barely diminished the flow of work across the ocean, however. Staley does not have much sympathy for the aggrieved. Last year, at a conference at the British Library, Staley was asked about an essay in which the British poet laureate Andrew Motion argued that national treasures belonged in the nations that created them. He retorted, “Like the Elgin Marbles?”

Perhaps disingenuously, Staley asserts that the Ransom Center’s success is not primarily about money. “You know what matters most to writers?” Staley said. “It’s the care we expend on their manuscripts. That’s the most flattering thing. They just love it.” Staley bears more than a passing resemblance to Mortimer Cropper, the “sinewy” American curator in A. S. Byatt’s novel “Possession” (1990). Cropper, who works at a land-grant university in New Mexico, gleefully despoils England of its literary patrimony, promising writers to preserve their manuscripts with fetishistic care. As Cropper puts it, “They would join their fellows in perfect conditions—air pressure, humidity, light—our conditions of keeping and viewing are the best in the world.”

Most major archives, particularly those in Europe, grew great with the cultures they were a part of, organically forming a repository for a community of writers and scholars. That is not the case with the Texas collection. The center was the invention of an ambitious dean: Harry Huntt Ransom. In 1956, Ransom gave a talk in Austin to a group called the Philosophical Society of Texas. His subject was the poor state of the university’s book collections. At the time, the University of Texas was a good regional school with an excellent football team. Its library held the usual fare bought from rare-book collectors: fine bindings, travel arcana, books of local interest.

Ransom believed that one of the richest states in the country should have a book collection worthy of it. In his lecture, he proposed “that there be established somewhere in Texas—let’s say in the capital city—a center of our cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation.” Texas’s power brokers responded with money, and the university allowed Ransom to use some of its oil revenue for acquisitions. (Part of the university’s land lies on the Permian Basin.)

Ransom acquired books and manuscripts so rapidly that they piled up in the halls and stairwells. “G.T.T.”—Gone to Texas—became a recognized abbreviation in the rare-book business. He was also innovative. He bought the collections of the living or only recently dead—writers whom Harvard and Yale considered too green. Ransom, who earned the nickname the Great Acquisitor, not only bought these writers’ manuscripts and letters; he tried to gather everything from baby book to death mask. As a result, the center has Arthur Conan Doyle’s undershirts, Evelyn Waugh’s writing desk, a pair of beaded moccasins worn by D. H. Lawrence, Anne Sexton’s glasses, and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish typewriter.

By 1970, the Texas collection had developed an emphasis on British modernism. It owned important manuscripts and ephemera from Samuel Beckett (his English translation of “Waiting for Godot”), Joyce (four signed copies of the first print run of “Ulysses”), Dylan Thomas (a manuscript of “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”), and Malcolm Lowry (a handwritten manuscript of “Under the Volcano”). Around this time, Philip Larkin published an essay in which he warned of “the likelihood of a situation wherein the manuscripts of every considerable British writer since 1850 are in American hands.”

But there was no going back. As the biggest buyer in the archives market, Ransom drove prices way up, and prominent authors began to expect money for their drafts and letters. “Your gift of archives . . . will cause a painful precedent,” Evelyn Waugh complained in a 1965 postcard to his brother Alec, who had given away his manuscripts to Boston University. “Most of your fellow-writers hope to support their declining years by sales to Texas.” In a similar vein, the British novelist Olivia Manning wrote to a friend, “I am sure you could, if you tried, get that money from Texas. . . . Those arrangements with Texas are very elastic & I have twice received sums long before they were due to arrive. Try & see if I am not right! Yes, how much I regret the mss. I destroyed in the past.”

In 1971, Ransom was forced to resign; he was brought down, in part, by complaints about the center’s excessive spending and its secrecy. He died in 1976. A period of decline ensued, until 1988, when a university search committee hired Staley. He was then at the University of Tulsa, where he had bought the archives of Edmund Wilson, the Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann, and Jean Rhys.

Staley was a natural collector. His mother “came from some means,” as he puts it, and his father’s family manufactured embalming fluid, among other chemicals. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—the Texas accent comes and goes, depending on where he is and whom he’s talking to—and filled his bookshelves with Big Little storybooks. “I had a library when I was twelve, and I numbered it,” he says. “It was a giveaway, though I didn’t know it.” After college, he attended classes at Georgetown Law School; although he left after a few weeks, he couldn’t bear to throw away his textbooks.

At Texas, Staley quickly learned to avoid the mistake of his immediate predecessor, Decherd Turner, who focussed on the preservation of manuscripts. “Acquisitions are what people like,” he says. “They like to be a part of it.” Shortly after he took the job, Staley had his first big success. In 1988, one of his curators got word that the archives of Stuart Gilbert, who had been James Joyce’s translator and friend, might be for sale. Staley went to the senior administrators of the university—some of whom, he was convinced, did not know who Joyce was. “I said, ‘This is an opportunity for the University of Texas to get back in the game, in a big way.’ ” Gilbert’s widow wanted an offer up front. Staley took the gamble, paying her the full two hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars that she was asking, without examining the papers.