Purpose
and Scope Editorial Policies
Citation
and
Institutional Permission
Abbreviation and Symbols
Welcome to Melville's Marginalia Online, an electronic catalog of books owned and borrowed by American author Herman Melville, and a digital edition of marked and annotated books that survive from his library. This page explains the project's aims and editorial procedures. To access the site's Online Catalog or use its keyword search tool, select "Search" from the upper-left menu. Return to this page at any time by selecting "Policies."
Purpose and Scope
The author 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, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Honoré de Balzac, 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
readers.
Melville's Marginalia Online
succeeds and augments two existing resources. With its "Online Catalog"
of books and documents owned and borrowed by Melville, the project
follows Merton M. Sealts Jr.'s
"Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed" (1948-50, 1966, and
1988). For over half a century, Sealts's Check-List has
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 has also documented the growing number and
locations of surviving books autographed, marked, and annotated in
Melville's hand, with
entries devoted to newly emerged books appearing in successive editions
of Sealts's Melville's Reading, as well as in
supplements published by Sealts and Steven Olsen-Smith in Melville
Society Extracts and Leviathan: A Journal of
Melville Studies. Supplying fuller bibliographic entries
than was possible in the printed resources, the "Online Catalog" is
instantly updateable as new volumes emerge. Its organization and
features are described in the "Introduction
to the Online Catalog."
Along with maintaining the "Online Catalog," Melville's
Marginalia Online digitally reproduces books that survive
from Melville's library.
In this role it succeeds Wilson Walker Cowen's Melville's
Marginalia
(1965; rpt. 1987). 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. Cowen was
first to undertake the task of
making Melville's marginalia available to researchers with his 1965
Harvard University
dissertation. But he performed his work 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 poetical works by John
Milton, William Wordsworth, and Edmund Spenser, to name a few. Along
with being incomplete, Cowen's edition is difficult
to use owing to its own rarity outside of major research institutions.
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 creative processes, and, more broadly, of the
relationships of literary production to broader ideological contexts of
history, culture, and literacy.
The project's "Online Catalog" and "Browse Volumes" feature supply links to digital copies of Melville's books that can be examined in the site's page viewer. Mouse over the spine images in "Browse" to display bibliographical descriptions at upper left, and click on the spines to open digital copies. In most instances, the spine images in "Browse" are of copies owned by Melville, but in cases of surviving books with missing or mutilated spines, images of period surrogate spines are displayed. All images in the project's page viewer are of the copies Melville owned or (in rare instances) borrowed. The images are accompanied by bibliographical descriptions
and documentary notes, as well as documentation and transcriptions of
marginalia. Digital copies are added as funds become available for imaging
services at institutions where Melville's books are preserved, and as
volumes held by private individuals become available for photographic
capture by the project. Selected digital copies include critical introductions
to marginalia, and it is the goal of Melville's
Marginalia Online to supply critical introductions for all
published copies as contributing scholars continue to take part in
the project. If you are a practicing scholar or graduate student in the
humanities interested in contributing a critical introduction for an existing or
forthcoming digital copy, and/or undertaking XML markup to render it searchable by keyword, contact the editors through the site's "Contact and Support" page to discuss the possibility of taking on an assignment.
Editorial Policies
Documentary Display
Page images display in the
project's image window with one-click view options of height and width and drop-down zoom options at the top-right of the screen. The left sidebar apparatus
consists of a collapsible hierarchy of section divisions, page labels,
and documentary descriptions and transcriptions. Selecting a page label
identified as marked and/or annotated will display its associated image
in the main window and, beneath the highlighted page label in the left
sidebar, descriptions of the markings on the page as well as
transcriptions of
annotations. For example, see Melville's marginalia to Matthew 26.45
in his copy of The
New
Testament,
with the descriptive apparatus open at left to page 52, the image for
which is
displayed at height in the main window. Positions of marginalia on the
page are documented by
numeric reference to the textual lines on the page, excluding page
headers, blank lines, and non-textual printed lines containing
separator bars or ornamental devices. In order as
they appear on the page (from the
top of the page downward, and from within the text area outward),
marginalia are described or transcribed beneath the page label,
beginning in the present example with Melville's top margin pencil
annotation followed by markings he applied to textual lines 1-6 and 2-3
(the preceding numeral 1 followed by a colon designates the first of
the two columns that comprise the layout of this particular book, and
would not be designated in the apparatus for a page with an undivided
text area).
For a page containing erased and/or faded marginalia, the apparatus
entry includes an "enhanced image" option
that, when selected, displays a version of the page that has been
layered and filtered through imaging software to bring out the content
of the
erased or faded evidence. For example, see Melville's marginalia to Matthew
Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna"
in his copy of Arnold's New
Poems, with the
apparatus open at left to page 20 displaying an "enhanced image"
option. "Commentary" links address problematic aspects of marginalia in
Melville's books and may accompany unerased as well as erased evidence.
Where appropriate, commentary may also identify matters of
critical significance such as the influence of a marked
passage on Melville's own writing or an unclear allusion in an
annotation. Descriptions and commentary are devoted to verified
inscriptions, only, and do not typically address other material
features such as paper imperfections and stray press ink that could be mistaken for
marginalia or, no less frequently, pencil offsets and show-through's of
marginalia on adjacent pages. For instance, in the enhanced image
displaying erased marginalia on page 117, volume 6, of Melville's set
of Shakespeare's Dramatic Works, we can actually
discern marginalia on three consecutive pages: the erased checkmark at
line 15 on 117, unerased checkmarks from its verso (the following page
118), and still other unerased checkmarks from the recto of the next
leaf (page 119). The descriptive apparatus for page 117 refers only to
the legitimate checkmark at line 15. The absence of additional
documentation indicates for users that the other marks are "ghosts"—not
actually present on page 117 but identified respectively in apparatus
entries for 118 and 119. This example illustrates the importance of
examining the images on this web site in light of accompanying
editorial documentation.
Transcriptions of Melville's Hand
Transcriptions displayed in the apparatus present the
latest versions of inscriptions and annotations in Melville's hand,
with readings aimed at representing Melville's intentions in the act of
inscription. The transcriptions do not represent the
genetic details of revised content, such as strike-through's
or instances of over-writing, although such matters are addressed
procedurally in accompanying commentary. Nor do the
transcriptions represent Melville's frequent instances of fused,
elided,
omitted, or transposed letter forms, although outright misspellings are
reproduced literatim
in instances where they can be plausibly determined. For an informative
account of the problems and intricacies of Melville's hand, see the
statement of "Textual Policy," by G. Thomas Tanselle, in
the Correspondence
volume of the Northwestern-Newberry Writings of Herman Melville,
ed. Lynn Horth.
Melville habitually inscribed annotations in the top,
bottom, and outside margins of the page, often linking annotations in
the top and bottom margins to text with corresponding x's or other
varieties of markings. In all cases,
editorial policy at Melville's
Marginalia Online is to observe the line breaks of
Melville's inscriptions as well as the exact distributions of
Melville's
words per written line. Although erased markings are with
rare exceptions fully documented, Melville's erased
annotations range among the fully deciphered, the partially deciphered,
and the
undeciphered. As illustrated in the descriptive apparatus for page 60
in Melville's copy of Thomas Beale'sThe Natural History of the
Sperm Whale, partially deciphered erased
annotations appear with
editorial insertions enclosed by square brackets. Where words and
letters can be responsibly conjectured on the basis of material
evidence, these bracketed conjectural readings appear in non-italicized
characters. Single undeciphered words appear bracketed as question
marks preceded and followed by dashes. In instances where the number of
words
in an erased line are not clear, a bracketed editorial estimate is
supplied in italic characters.
Attribution of Marginalia
Owing to the dispersal of Melville's library,
and indeed to the fugitive character of books generally,
questions inevitably emerge regarding conditions under which
the notes and markings in Melville's books may be confidently
attributed to
him, or may instead be assumed to derive from other readers. Owing to
Melville's distinct style of handwriting—a style that remained fairly
consistent from the 1840s up until his death in 1891—positive
identification is typically a straightforward matter of editorial
recognition, with problematic cases analyzed against examples of his
handwriting in verified period documents. In fact, Melville's
handwriting is sufficiently distinctive that these means have been used
successfully to identify his marginalia in books that lack his
autograph and cannot be associated with him by any available
external evidence. But there are numerous cases when inscriptions and
annotations in Melville's books cannot reliably be identified as his.
When handwriting can be positively associated with some other person in
Melville's circle or with a subsequent owner whose identity is known,
the individual is identified by name in the left sidebar apparatus
entry for the inscription or annotation. When inscriptions or
annotations cannot reliably be associated with Melville or any
other identifiable person (such as the presenter of a book who
inscribed it to Melville or a family member known to have consulted it)
or with an unidentified bookseller or librarian (which is
sometimes possible based on the content of the inscription), they are
labeled in the apparatus as "unattributed." All inscriptions and
annotations not labeled as unattributed, and not identified in some way
with other specific persons or entities, are judged by the editors of Melville's Marginalia Online
to be in the hand of Herman Melville.
The problem of attribution increases substantially with
presumed origins of markings in Melville's books. By strict
standards of verification, all markings are by
necessity attributed
rather than confirmed
for the simple reason that they lack the strong corroborative character
of Melville's recognizable letter forms. But Melville's accustomed
array of signal
marks is in many instances quite distinct and recognizable, so that in
most cases it would seem overly fastidious to question the authenticity
of
a triple cross-check mark, say, in a copy known by documentary
evidence to have been owned by him. Even Melville's individual
checkmarks
frequently display a characteristically rounded contour that is readily
distinguished from sharply angled specimens. Nonetheless, except in
cases where marks are explicitly associated with annotations in
Melville's hand, in no case can the possibility be excluded that a
subsequent reader (whether in or outside of the Melville family)
consulted a book owned and marked by Melville and (for whatever reason)
proceeded to mark it in a fashion that resembled marginalia it
already contained. Moreover, Melville's frequent use of
generic, non-distinct markings such as marginal scores and
underlines makes attribution an unavoidable problem as it relates to
copies that left the Melville family following his death, many of which
found their way into used bookstores and circulating
libraries, or copies that were already in a used state when Melville
acquired them in the first place. As with its treatment of annotations
and inscriptions, but in many cases on a basis that is necessarily more
provisional than corroborative, the project treats all markings in
Melville's books as the product of his hand unless compelling
circumstances exist to throw doubt on the association. In instances of
compelling doubt about the origin of a mark, it is described as
"unattributed" in the apparatus, with evidence behind
that classification addressed in accompanying
commentary or, more generally, in the documentary note to that
digital copy. In due course, the editors of Melville's Marginalia Online
will add a glossary to this page that displays images of Melville's
accustomed markings and the terms by which they are identified in the
apparatuses to digital copies of his books.
XML Encoding
Keyword search retrieval and display are enabled by machine-readable transcriptions in extensible markup language (XML) that associates printed text and Melville's hand-written words with pixel coordinates on the page and leaf images that comprise the digital copies of his books. Numeric pixel values in the markup allow for printed and handwritten words to appear highlighted (or outlined in red on enhanced images) when submitted and displayed through use of the search tool. The coordinate-based character of the XML renders it incompatible with Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards. It has been adopted by Melville's Marginalia Online for its functional properties rather than for the descriptive purposes that commonly underlie markup practices in online humanities projects. The coordinate-based character of the XML presents no obstacles to accurate representation and regularization of transcribed text. Disrupted and non-standard word forms in text marked by Melville are encoded using the following conventions:
Line-end hyphenated words are encoded to return regularized word forms in keyword searches, and to prevent return of detached word segments:
<w x="2064">
<choice>
<hyph>quick-</hyph>
<reg>quickly</reg>
</choice>
</w>
</line>
<line c="2004" h="60" n="20">
<w x="739" endhyph="true">ly</w>
All instances of contracted words and expressions (i.e., "into't" and "sweet'st") are encoded to return either the actual or regularized word forms involved, depending on the search term:
<choice>
<orig>into't</orig>
<reg>into it</reg>
<reg>into</reg>
<reg>it</reg>
</choice>
and
<choice>
<orig>sweet'st</orig>
<reg>sweetest</reg>
</choice>
Similarly, hard-hyphenated compound words (i.e., "thunder-stone") are encoded to return the full hyphenated expression or any whole word contained within it (i.e., "thunder" or "stone"). Typographical errors are likewise encoded using <orig> and <reg> tagging, as are instances of anglicized or antiquated spelling (i.e., "honour" or "villany"), with the exception of pervasive obsolete pronouns and simple verb forms (i.e., "thou," "art," and "dost"), which are not regularized. Fuller flexibility such as wildcard options will be added as the search tool undergoes continued development.
The above markup practices have also been applied to transcriptions of Melville's handwritten annotations in instances of outright misspelling, contraction, and hyphenation where they can be plausibly determined. As explained in the section of "Editorial Policies" entitled "Transcriptions of Melville's Hand," transcriptions displayed in the sidebar apparatus of the page viewer present the latest versions of inscriptions and annotations in Melville's hand, with readings aimed at representing Melville's intentions in the act of inscription. This principle is likewise observed in the encoding of annotations and inscriptions. Accounts of genetic details, such as strike-through's and overwrite's, are provided in the commentary feature of the sidebar apparatus.
Links to downloadable XML for Melville's marginalia will be added to the record fields of digital copies as workflow, testing, and research initiatives by MMO staff members permit. In cases where staff responsible for the production of markup in a given volume or set are concurrently pursuing separate publication involving the data in question, downloadable XML may not be made available until their scholarship appears in print. Users interested in undertaking or overseeing markup for marginalia in a specific volume that is displayed but not yet searchable on the site are welcome to contact the editors through its "Contact and Support" page.
Citation and Institutional Permission
Documentation for written or edited material quoted or
cited in articles, books, and other forms of publication should include
author and title information plus Melville's Marginalia
Online, the project's three main editors, and date of
access. The following examples
illustrate proper documentation of content on this web site.
Marginalia:
Melville, Herman. "Melville's Marginalia in Thomas Beale's The
Natural History of the Sperm Whale." Melville's
Marginalia Online. Ed. Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg,
and Dennis C. Marnon. 2 April 2012.
A documentary note:
"Documentary Note to Melville's Marginalia in Thomas
Beale's The
Natural History of the Sperm Whale." Melville's
Marginalia Online. Ed. Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg,
and Dennis C. Marnon. 2 April 2012.
A critical introduction:
Yothers, Brian. "Introduction to Melville's Marginalia in The
New Testament and The
Book of Psalms. Melville's
Marginalia Online. Ed. Steven
Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon. 2 April
2012.
Commentary:
"Commentary to Melville's Marginalia in Matthew Arnold's New
Poems." Melville's
Marginalia Online. Ed. Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg,
and Dennis C. Marnon. 2 April
2012.
The Online Catalog
"Online Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by
Herman Melville." Ed. Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C.
Marnon. 1 January 2008.
Permission for displaying photographic
images on this
web site has been granted by the holding institutions and persons for
one-time use only.
Users should not download or copy an image without written consent from
the institutions or persons named in the record fields of digital
copies, or on
the "Photo Credits" page of this web site.
Abbreviation and Symbols
Unless otherwise indicated, primary works quoted or
cited in documentation and commentary on this web site refer to the Northwestern-Newberry Writings
of
Herman Melville. 14 volumes to
date. Eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel
Parker, G. Thomas Tanselle, and others. Evanston and Chicago:
Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1968-. Citations
include the abbreviation "NN" plus the work: Typee
(1968); Omoo (1968); Mardi
(1970); Redburn (1969); White-Jacket
(1970); Moby-Dick (1988); Pierre
(1971); The Piazza-Tales, and Other Prose Pieces
(1987); Israel Potter (1982); The
Confidence-Man (1984); Clarel
(1991); Correspondence (1993); Journals
(1989); Published Poems
(2009). Hyphenated and multi-worded titles among these works receive the following parenthetical abbreviations:
White-Jacket = NN WJ
Moby-Dick = NN MD
The Piazza-Tales, and Other Prose Pieces =
NN PTPP
Israel Potter = NN IP
The Confidence-Man = NN CM
Published Poems = NN PP
For secondary resources cited in commentary for a
digital copy on this website, see the resources listed in that
copy's critical introduction and/or documentary note.
The following symbols are used in this site's editorial commentary on revision
sequences in annotations and other inscriptions:
<letter or words>word = letter or words written over by subsequent inscription
letter or words = letter or words struck out
{letter or word} = letter or words inserted after initial inscription
[letter or words] = editorial remarks in italics