AUSTIN, Texas – The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archive of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014).

The archive documents the life and work of García Márquez, an author who obtained nearly unanimous critical acclaim and a worldwide readership.

Spanning more than half a century, García Márquez’s archive includes original manuscript material, predominantly in Spanish, for 10 books, from One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) to Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) to Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004); more than 2,000 pieces of correspondence, including letters from Carlos Fuentes and Graham Greene, drafts of his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, more than 40 photograph albums documenting all aspects of his life over nearly nine decades, the Smith Corona typewriters and computers on which he wrote some of the 20th century’s most beloved works, and scrapbooks meticulously documenting his career via news clippings from Latin America and around the world.

“García Márquez is a giant of 20th-century literature whose work brims with originality and wisdom,” said Bill Powers, president of the University of Texas at Austin. “The University of Texas at Austin — with expertise in both Latin America and the preservation and study of the writing process — is the natural home for this very important collection. Our students, our faculty and the state of Texas will benefit from it for years to come.”

Highlights in the archive include multiple drafts of García Márquez’s unpublished novel We’ll See Each Other in August, research for The General in His Labyrinth (1989) and a heavily annotated typescript of the novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981). The materials document the gestation and changes of García Márquez’s works, revealing the writer’s struggle with language and structure.

“Heir and admirer of literary innovators like Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, García Márquez experimented with intricate narrative structures, with lush and winding long sentences, with the clash of the ordinary and the impossible,” said José Montelongo, interim Latin American bibliographer at the university’s Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. “He was a master of the short form in novellas that read like Greek tragedies set in the Caribbean, as well as a consummate long-distance literary runner, master of the sprawling, genealogic novel in which everything fits, including history and crime and love and miracles. Above all, he was an intoxicating stylist with the primal instincts of a storyteller. As one literary critic has put it, García Márquez’s imagination was so powerful and original that he will be remembered as a creator of myths, a Latin American Homer.”

Born in Colombia, García Márquez began his career as a journalist in the 1940s, reporting from Bogotá and Cartagena and later serving as a foreign correspondent in Europe and Cuba. In 1961, he moved to Mexico City. Alongside his prolific journalism career, García Márquez published many works of fiction, including novels, novellas and multiple short story collections and screenplays. He published the first volume of his three-part memoir Vivir Para Contarla (“Living to Tell the Tale”) in 2002.

In a 1981 interview with The Paris Review, García Márquez said: “It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.”

The archive will reside at the Ransom Center alongside the work of many of the 20th century’s most notable authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner and James Joyce, who all influenced García Márquez.

The García Márquez materials will be accessible once processed and cataloged,

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No, it’s not a joke; it’s a contest.

The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco is inviting the public to submit nicknames for an ancient Chinese bronze vessel in the shape of a rhinoceros.

The 12-inch-high ritual vessel may once have held wine or food. It is particularly rare because few Chinese vessels made during the Bronze Age (approx. 1500-221 BC) were in the form of animals, and most of those featured surface decorations of other animals, like tigers or dragons.

The museum says it’s a masterpiece and should get the term of endearment it deserves.

People can submit one-word nicknames for the rhino by Jan. 1. Entry forms are on the museum’s website: www.asianart.org.

Museum staff will choose three names, awarding prizes that include a museum gift card and a plush rhino.

The public will then vote for a final winner, which will be announced in February.

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Auction Central News contributed to this report.

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The Fray Angelico Chavez History Library has had the 12-inch-by-15-inch map on loan since it was first displayed at the state Capitol during the 2012 centennial of New Mexico’s statehood.

“It was bugging me all the time, looking at it and wanting it,” said librarian Tomas Jaehn.

Jaehn said he reached out to Rodrigo Lake, the antiques dealer who owned the map. After some negotiating, Lake offered to sell the map for $35,000. Jaehn said endowments and a donation from the Newman’s Own Foundation, the nonprofit started by the late actor Paul Newman, helped. But the final $5,500 needed came from donors who regularly go to Jaehn’s lectures or are patrons of the library.

The map, titled Provincia de Nuevo Mexico, is dated 1778 and includes the Rio Grande and the locations of mountains, towns and native tribes. It’s missing its left border. The right border has pictures of several saints.

No decision has been made about where the map will be displayed, Jaehn said. It may be incorporated into the Palace of the Governors exhibits, he said. The map is being stored between glass sheets and officials are waiting for a museum conservator to assess the document’s condition.

According to Jaehn, the map was compiled by a soldier and explorer from Alicante, Spain named Nicolas Lafora. A captain in the Corps of Royal Engineers, Lafora left Spain for Mexico in 1764. In 1766, he was chosen by New Spain to record information daily about the geographical coordinates and landscape features.

Only one other original, hand-drawn map is part of the library’s collection of 7,000 maps. The rest are prints.

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Information from: The Santa Fe New Mexican, http://www.sfnewmexican.com

Copyright 2014 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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NEW YORK – Glassmaking originated around 2500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, and by the mid-first millennium B.C. it had spread throughout the ancient world. The number of vessels made from glass remained limited, however, until the introduction of two important technical advances—the use of the blowpipe and closed multipart molds—in the late first century B.C. and the early first century A.D., respectively. These advances revolutionized the glass industry under the Roman Empire, making glass vessels accessible to all and allowing producers to create a wide range of shapes, sizes, and usages. Some of the earliest vessels made by mold blowing bear the names of the craftsmen who “signed” the molds.

In the early first century A.D. the most outstanding examples of Roman mold-blown glass were made by a craftsman called Ennion, and products of his workshop are the focus of the exhibition Ennion: Master of Roman Glass, opening December 9 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is the first exhibition of ancient glass organized by the Metropolitan, which has one of the finest collections of this material in the world.

The exhibition is made possible by Diane Carol Brandt, The Vlachos Family Fund, and The David Berg Foundation.

Glassware—primarily jugs and cups—signed by Ennion was traded throughout the entire Mediterranean world and has been found during archaeological excavations at sites from Israel to Spain. Of the 37 complete or fragmentary vessels in the exhibition, 24 are by Ennion, including the Metropolitan Museum’s three signed pieces. Examples by other named glassworkers of the period—including one of only two intact works by Ennion’s closest rival, Aristeas, as well as examples of beakers signed by Jason, Neikais, and Meges—will also be presented. A selection of unsigned blown glass that illustrates Ennion’s profound influence on the nascent Roman glass industry will also be on view.

The exhibition features works from museums and private collections in Europe, Israel, and the United States. Lenders to the exhibition are The Corning Museum of Glass; Israel Antiquities Authority and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; The British Museum; the Louvre; Museo di Antichità, Turin; Musei Civici del Castello Visconteo, Pavia; Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Adria; Yale University Art Gallery; Newark Museum; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; the Yunwai Lou Collection, New York; and the Strada Collection, Scaldasole, Italy. Six works were also lent by Dr. Shlomo Moussaieff, who had the initial concept for the exhibition.

A catalogue suitable for non-specialists will accompany the exhibition. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, the catalogue will be available in the Museum’s book shops (paperback, $24.95).

The catalogue is made possible by The Adelaide Milton de Groot Fund, in memory of the de Groot and Hawley families. Additional support is provided by Dr. Shlomo Moussaieff.

Ancient glassworking techniques will be demonstrated within the exhibition by means of a video that was commissioned by the Corning Museum of Glass and filmed at the Roman-style wood-fired furnace at Villa Borg, Germany.

Education programs will include exhibition tours and a Friday Focus lecture on February 20 by William Gudenrath, an authority on historical hot glassworking techniques.

The exhibition was organized by Christopher S. Lightfoot, Curator, Department of Greek and Roman Art. Exhibition design is by Daniel Kershaw, Exhibition Design Manager; graphics are by Mortimer LeBigre; and lighting is by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, Lighting Design Managers, all of the Museum’s Design Department.

The exhibition will be featured on the Museum’s website at www.metmuseum.org.

Join the conversation with the Met on Facebook (@metmuseum), Instagram (@metmuseum), and Twitter (@metmuseum) via the hashtag #Ennion.

After the presentation at the Metropolitan Museum, the exhibition will be shown at the Corning Museum of Glass (May 15–October 19, 2015).

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