The Magna Carta, an original printing of the Emancipation Proclamation and a first edition of the King James Bible. All these famous historical documents and hundreds more that touch on individual liberty and human dignity reside on Texas Tech’s campus.
The Remnant Trust resides in the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library and in the Museum of Texas Tech.
“What we hope is that by exposure to these documents by the real first editions, 300-year-old, 500-year-old, 700-year-old document in your hand that it will get people to spend maybe just a few minutes more that day or every day or any day to think about these ideas. To think about where they came from, how they impact us, why they’re important, are they important, how do we move forward and to do it in such a way we hope in civil discourse that we’re part of a conversation.”
“If anything, we’re a catalyst to insight conversation, to excite people to talk about these ideas and to do it in a way that’s kind of open.”
That’s Kristopher Bex, the trust’s president and a member of its board of directors. His goal is to foster conversation and thoughtfulness through the contents of the collection. He says portions of the trust are available to be loaned out to educational foundations and universities in the US and elsewhere.
“We obviously want these things to be used. I mean that’s what we do. I don’t really want them to sit in a display case and you know just kind of sit there as like an arrowhead collection.”
“You can come by and look at them and yeah, they’re really cool and they’re really old and oh look that’s great, but for us it’s we really want people to be engaged. I mean we want classes and curriculum and things developed around them, talks or any kind of outreach.”
The trust, which was incorporated in 1999, came to Tech in 2015. What led the trust to consider Tech was a highly successful exhibit here. The museum temporarily housed parts of the collection for three months in 2012. Bex says more than 70,000 people visited the museum to see the exhibit.
“From that, a greater conversation started. What kind of relationship do we want to have with Texas Tech? Are they interested with doing something further?”
“We were in the midst of kind of looking for a home. We had been founded in Indiana, we had always been in Indiana and you know had been kind of looking for a good home-base if you will, a good long-standing partnership.”
The trust, which began with the pursuit of 100 books, continues to grow. It now has many, many more manuscripts, 1st editions, early works dealing with the topics of individual liberty and human dignity. The documents are purchased piecemeal through the trust’s fundraising efforts.
“It’s just grown over time. I mean that list of a hundred expanded and developed into what’s now over fifteen-hundred volumes in the collection and I would say that we have about five pages of wish-lists of things that we would like to find or you know that we at least have an eye open for.”
Securing the trust came through the support, in part, by grants from the Helen Jones Foundation and The CH Foundation.
CH Bex says keeping the rare collection safe from sunlight and humidity are paramount. Tech provides the climate controlled environment and vault space.
“They’re supportive in what we do. They’re providing us great opportunity, exposure to faculty, working with us to spend time getting stuff into the campus life into the greater community as well, service organizations and things like that.”
“It also allows us to continue our main focus which is to travel around the country with these books to different schools and also grow it.”
Bex’s father was the driving force behind the creation of the non-profit trust. It operates on capital from grants, private and public contributions, and capital raised through fundraising events.
Bex says very few of the holdings have been digitized because an original is the most potent way to experience a document or book. But the digital age does have a benefit.
“As the digital age has continued to push things in a direction that pendulum also swings back to it, drives up the interests in these original documents.”