Purpose
and Scope Editorial Policies Visualization
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. Under this policy, typographical transcriptions of text marked by Melville observe basic upper- and lower-case distinctions but do not observe font-stylistic distinctions in the original texts such as italics and small caps. Currently this minimalist editorial approach is warranted by the project’s guiding emphasis on substantive (as opposed to refined) search functionality and display, as well as by persistent methodological obstacles to encoding marginalia satisfactorily in accordance with TEI guidelines. The project's encoding practices will evolve as technology and funding allow.
Editorial decisions for transcribing content as “marked” vary according to the type of marginalia involved. Marginal scores, for instance, have relatively clear beginning- and end-points in relation to textual line enumeration. MMO’s policy in such instances is to transcribe and identify as “marked” the entirety of the text within scored content, even though linguistically textual lines may begin and conclude mid-clause. Instances of marking types like checkmarks and x’s involve less spatial clarity, making detailed association of marginalia and textual content more of an interpretive matter. Editorial line designations and transcriptions of content in such instances are made on the basis of syntactical sense, and generally err on the side of inclusiveness in situations where it is unclear whether Melville was marking an independent clause or a subordinate phrase within it.
The coordinate-based character of the XML presents no obstacles to accurate representation and regularization of searchable text. Disrupted and non-standard word forms in text marked by Melville are encoded using the following conventions:
<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, miswriting, 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, where misspellings and miswritings by Melville are represented literatim as well as corrected. For instance, Melville's miswriting of "vortex" as "voxtex" in his annotation to a passage on page 45 of Thomas Beale's The Natural History of the Sperm Whale is represented in original and corrected forms:
<choice>
<missp>voxtex</missp>
<reg>vortex</reg>
</choice>
Melville's misspellings (whether inadvertent or accustomed on his part) receive identical corrective tagging, so that instances return in search-tool results regardless of whether the original or corrected spelling is submitted using the site's search tool. Thus his spelling of "evel" in an annotation on page 133 of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Spiritual Laws"
<choice>
<missp>evel</missp>
<reg>evil</reg>
</choice>
will return along with correctly spelled instances of "evil" in Melville's marginalia when that term is submitted using the site's search tool.
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.
Visualization
Along with making Melville's marginalia searchable by keyword, XML-encoding and transformation at MMO radically expand opportunities for access and analysis, converting reading evidence to useful formats that link directly to the project’s high-res photo-reproductions. Currently visitors to the site can generate a dynamic Word Cloud (or “Cirrus”) and Terms Table for any encoded volume using the project’s integrated adoption of Voyant Tools, an open-source visualization platform created by Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell. To generate a visualization for marginalia in an encoded volume, open the volume in the page viewer and select one of the tool icons in the brown band at the top of the screen to display the filtering interface for visualization. (If the tool icons are dimmed, the volume lacks marginalia or has not yet been encoded, and selection will produce a notice to that effect.)
(Figures 1 and 2 below pertain to visualized marginalia in Melville's copy of Thomas Beale's The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, where most of the markings and annotations are erased but viewable through enhanced imaging.)
Figure 1: Filtering Interface (cropped).
The filtering interface enables users to narrow results by section or chapter and by attribution of marginalia. The default filtration settings restrict output to marginalia attributed only to Melville but are otherwise all-inclusive. To restrict output to marked content, users may de-select filtration options associated with "Forms of Inscription," which will filter out Melville's autograph, annotations, and other forms of inscription where applicable. Only sections containing marginalia will visualize; restricting results to unmarked sections will produce an error page.
Quantitative results may vary in cases of antiquated, anglicized, or irregular spelling in the content of marked passages and/or in Melville's hand-written annotations to textual content. XML transformation scenarios differ structurally depending on the selected visualization format, but all scenarios effectively restore the text to a non-regularized state with the exception of line-end hyphenations and outright misspellings. Thus Melville's spellings of "evel" and "devel" (which were irregular in the orthography of his own time, as now) are regularized as "evil" and "devil" in visualizations, where they will tally along with instances of these standard spellings in text marked by him, contributing to a single quantitative total. But non-regularized textual instances of antiquated or anglicized spellings in the visualizations, such as "colour," will be quantified separately there from any instance of Melville's spelling of "color" in an annotation or notation. In that instance, "colour" and "color" are quantified differently from one another in the visualizations, and these differences will be observed in search-tool results triggered by term-selection in the visualizations. Users can manage such discrepancies to an extent by deploying the wildcard format "colo*" (adding an asterisk to the end of any improvised word root) in visualizations that include search fields, such as the Terms Table. This action will quantify "colour" and "color" together in the visualization but will also add words such as "colony" to the table row for "colo*" if that term is also present in the visualized marginalia. Clicking on the wildcard term in such an instance will generate search-tool results that include all three word forms among the terms returned.
Where applicable, the filtering interface includes options for adding marginalia in associated volumes, such as the additional volumes of a multi-volume set or separate works by the same author. Stop-words can be added or removed in any visualized data using the "Define options" toggle switch that displays on mouse-over at the upper-right corner of each visual. Users can select the "Export" feature next to "Define options" to generate a permanent URL for the visualization. That action will open a separate browser tab that displays an enlarged view of the visualization, and it is this stand-alone view of the visual that will be saved (not the one situated within MMO's page viewer) if the visualization is bookmarked and revisited. Additional "Export" options include embeddable code for using a visual within external web environments as well as an option for creating an actively-linked bibliographical reference for the visual.
Figure 2: Terms Table (cropped), with "Export" and "Define options" icons displayed.
Peak performance of visualization tools at MMO depends in part on browser types and settings. Based on testing by MMO staff to date, Mozilla Firefox offers the fullest range of functionality.
(Figures 3 and 4 below visualize marginalia in Melville's copies of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays: First Series, Essays: Second Series, and The Conduct of Life)
Word Cloud (Figure 3)
The Cirrus tool displays a word cloud of the highest-frequency terms in the visualized marginalia, offering a rapid grasp of the terminology to which Melville gravitated most consistently in his marking of the visualized content. In compatible browsers, hover over words in the cloud to display their quantities. Clicking on words will open or refresh a new browser tab, triggering a search in the visualized volume(s) and displaying term-specific snippets with links to high-resolution images of the marginalia in MMO's page viewer. At the lower-left corner, click to the left or right of the disc in the "Terms" slider of the Cirrus tool to increase or decrease the number of words displayed in the cloud. Word clouds offer a useful but designedly reductive impression of the evidence, indicating recurrent terminology across the visualized marginalia but not providing a broad sense of its variety. For a more exhaustive display of terms in the marginalia, users may choose to visualize evidence in the form of a Terms Table.
Terms Table (Figure 4)
The Terms Table displays a list of all of the words in the visualized marginalia (minus stop-words) by order of frequency from highest to lowest (default) and sparklines indicating trends across marginalia when more than one volume is visualized (as illustrated here for Melville's Marginalia in Emerson's essays, but not in the single-volume Terms Table visual for his marginalia in Beale's Natural History of the Sperm Whale illustrated above). Expand rows to display associated collocates and (where applicable) correlations and phrases. In expanded view, collocate counts may apply to word pairings within distinctively marked passages, or to pairings across marked passages that are adjacent or in proximity to one another. Clicking on the tabulated words will open or refresh a new browser tab, triggering a search in the visualized volume(s) and displaying term-specific snippets with links to high-resolution images of the marginalia in MMO's page viewer. Clicking on column headings will reorder lists by term and count. Entering or selecting terms in the text field at the lower-left corner of the Terms Table will narrow table content.
Development and integration of additional visualization tools at Melville's Marginalia Online are under way. To keep informed of these developments, follow the project on Facebook and Twitter in the upper-left sidebar. While the primary functions and output of these tools are rigorously tested for accuracy prior to being made available to users on the site's front end, supplementary features in some tools remain inoperable and will either be integrated successfully in due course or removed as funding and development allow. If you would like to support the work of augmenting and improving these resources, please make a tax-deductible donation to Melville's Marginalia Online through its Support page, or by clicking on the mug icon in the upper-left sidebar.
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