Introduction

The acclaimed writer of Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, Sailor and other revered works of American literature was also, as might be expected, a great reader of books. Yet few even among American literary scholars are familiar with the scope and variety of Herman Melville's personal library, and the profound influence of his reading on the growth of his intellect and on the composition of his own fiction and poetry. From youth onward Melville educated himself through rigorous, systematic reading, a habit of life and mind he assumed after the bankruptcy and death of his father required him to withdraw from formal schooling. By the time of his death in 1891, Melville’s library numbered some 1,000 volumes before being dispersed among friends, family members, and second-hand book sellers in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Books bearing Melville's autograph and marginalia continue to resurface, bringing periodic gains to our knowledge of his intellectual and aesthetic development.* Since Melville marked and annotated his books with uncommon regularity and precision, the expanding record of evidence reveals his direct engagement with many past and contemporaneous works and figures: the King James Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Arthur Schopenhauer, William Wordsworth, Honoré de Balzac, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a host of others. An ongoing project with cooperation and support from numerous individuals and institutions, Melville’s Marginalia Online aims to make this wealth of evidence fully and widely available to scholars and students.

Melville’s Marginalia Online succeeds and augments two existing resources: Merton M. Sealts Jr.’s “Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed” (1948-50, 1966, and 1988) and Wilson Walker Cowen’s Melville’s Marginalia (1965; rpt. 1987). For the past half century, Sealts’s Check-List served as the authoritative record of title and edition information for books Melville is known to have owned and borrowed over the course of his reading life. It also documented the growing number and locations of surviving books autographed in Melville’s hand, with entries devoted to newly emerged books appearing in successive editions of Sealts’s Melville’s Reading, and in supplements published by Sealts and Steven Olsen-Smith in Melville Society Extracts and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.

The Check-List documented the steady increase from 210 surviving titles, in 1948, to the present total of 285. Yet the process of updating the record in print carried numerous drawbacks, including long intervals between the time a book resurfaced and the time it was publicized, the tendency of emergent books to change ownership and location shortly after the updates appeared, and the inconvenient distribution of updates among multiple issues of Extracts and Leviathan. By combining the evidence of books owned and borrowed within a single updateable resource, the project's "Online Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville" provides a fully searchable (and forever current) listing of the nearly 800 known titles connected to Melville and his immediate family members.

Along with maintaining an online catalog of titles and editions, Melville’s Marginalia Online is a long-term project devoted to the editing and publication of markings and annotations in the books that survive from Melville’s library. Housed within the separate collections of numerous research institutions and private individuals, Melville’s actual copies remain dispersed, their marginalia out of reach to most scholars. The task of making Melville’s marginalia available to researchers was first attempted by Wilson Walker Cowen in his 1965 Harvard University dissertation Melville’s Marginalia—well before the emergence of many important books such as Melville’s marked and annotated copies of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, and multi-volume poetical works by John Milton, William Wordsworth, and Edmund Spenser, to name a few.

Along with being outdated, Cowen’s edition is difficult to use owing to its own rarity outside of major research institutions and (more seriously) its awkward and often imprecise transcriptions. While it aimed to meet a serious need in American literary studies, Cowen’s Melville’s Marginalia failed to make the scholarly impact warranted by the record of Melville’s reading and its significance for our understanding of his thought and writings. The significance is profound, with implications for the study of literary influence, of Melville’s aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities, and (with the dearth of extant manuscripts for Melville’s writings) of his creative processes.

Books autographed by Melville in the late 1840s document his absorption with Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists—touchstones for subject matter and rhetoric in Moby-Dick and Pierre. Copies marked and annotated as early as 1850, and as late as the 1880s, illuminate the creative processes behind his own writings, including compositional practices that were inseparable from his habits of reading. Books inscribed by Melville in the 1860s detail his rigorous study of versification and literary criticism. Titles acquired in the 1870s and 80s expose his late absorption with the visual arts. Unautographed but marked and annotated books published in 1891 bear witness to Melville’s intellectual meditations in the year of his death on subjects of human isolation and mortality. In these and other patterns of reading we witness Melville conceptually integrating his knowledge of ancient and contemporaneous figures, as shown by the many names referenced in his annotations: Lucretius in his copy of Milton, Milton in his copy of Homer, Homer in his copy of Dante, and Homer and Dante in his copy of Arnold. The list proceeds, illustrating the depths of literacy beneath Melville’s richly allusive writing.

The project’s "Online Catalog" provides access to its electronic editions of Melville’s marginalia, with bibliographical entries of surviving copies supplying links to two related features: (1) a critical introduction to the copy and its marginalia, and (2) an exact transcription of the type areas and marginalia of every page marked or inscribed by Melville. As a collection of textual and signal transcriptions, Melville’s Marginalia Online is a scholarly edition rather than a digital photographic archive of the actual pages in Melville’s original copies. While the General Editor and Associate General Editor considered the prospect of a virtual archive at early points in the planning of the project, they foresaw a variety of obstacles to digital photographic reproduction on the World Wide Web. These obstacles include the substantial time and costs involved with the photographic services provided by institutions where Melville’s books are housed; the material risks involved with subjecting the more fragile copies of Melville’s books to the stress of photographic procedures; and restrictions imposed by ownership and copyright laws upon the photographic duplication of Melville’s books.

Further complicating photographic reproduction, Melville's books are preserved at numerous professional research institutions, large and small, with varying levels of technical resources at their disposal. Others are housed in the collections of private owners, and spread out between New Haven, Connecticut, and Los Angeles, California. Faced with the wide distribution of Melville’s original copies, and with the costs and restrictions described above, the editors opted for the still complicated but more practical plan of reproducing Melville’s marginalia in the form of an online edition. The editors hold out some hope that evolving institutional policies and means may eventually remove some of the restrictions on photographic reproduction and digital publication, in which case Melville's Marginalia Online will be prepared to incorporate digital photographs as developments permit.

As a collection of edited transcriptions in PDF format, Melville’s Marginalia Online aims to provide all the advantages of a computerized textual resource. Each alphabetical entry of a surviving book is linked to surrogate copies of marked and annotated pages, with each transcription proofed against its original. Each individual edition is fully searchable and navigable through standard tools on Adobe Reader; and in due course the project’s Google search device will enable key-word investigations of the text areas, marginalia, and editorial/critical commentaries throughout the collection. Every passage of marked and annotated text is linked to pop-up commentary addressing the potential significance of Melville’s recorded response. Critical introductions authored by contributing scholars provide contextual, interpretive, and bibliographical information to assist users in the study of individual transcriptions. Whereas these introductions will eventually constitute an extensive library of literary criticism on Melville’s books and reading, their aim is to prompt rather than to exhaust study of Melville’s marginalia.

Users investigating a copy represented in the PDF library should bear in mind that marked and annotated pages alone do not provide full evidence of Melville's reading. Melville of course read more than what he marked, and owing to a remarkably retentive memory he retained and applied much more of his reading than his surviving marginalia can indicate. Users should investigate the texts of books in their entirety before publishing research based exclusively on evidence provided in the present edition. When available, facsimile or microfilm copies of editions owned by Melville are identified in the bibliographical sections of the introductions and commentary to marginalia.

Thanks to the individuals and institutions listed in the Acknowledgments section of this website, to cooperation among its editorial staff of three universities, and to the promised contributions of numerous scholars, Melville’s Marginalia Online will expand and develop rapidly in the years to come. The project's "Online Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville" was launched in November 2008. In progress are editions of Melville’s markings and annotations in his copies of Aristotle, Matthew Arnold, William Alger, the King James Bible, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and poems, and Shakespeare’s plays and poems, among others. To receive email announcements of these and continued developments at Melville’s Marginalia Online, enter your name and email address on the "Feedback" page of this website, where your comments on the project are welcomed.

* For a comprehensive listing of the copies that have emerged since 1988, see Steven Olsen-Smith and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. “A Cumulative Supplement to Melville’s Reading (1988),” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 6.1 (March 2004), 55-82.