Modern Books and Manuscripts

Houghton Library’s incomparable Melville collection holds priceless literary manuscripts, important original letters, his and his father’s travel journals, Melville family documents and correspondence, nineteenth-century family photographs, and the sublime Eaton oil portrait (1870) of the author. Harvard also owns the largest number of books from HM’s library in public or private hands. Melville’s library is estimated to have contained 1,000 volumes at the time of his death. Approximately half stayed in the family, with the rest carted away by Manhattan and Brooklyn booksellers. Most of the family holdings were long ago donated to research libraries with strong Melville family archives: Houghton, the New York Public Library, and the Berkshire Athenaeum. For many decades now, Harvard has been a major center for Melville studies in general and for editorial work on his manuscripts, his reading, and his marginalia in particular.

From Melville’s Marginalia, by Wilson Walker Cowen, 1965. Harvard University Archives, HU 90.8730.15

As a graduate student in the university’s English Department in the early 1960s, Wilson Walker Cowen took advantage of Houghton’s rich holdings at the time, as well as those of other research libraries and private collections, to compile his massive eleven-volume PhD dissertation Melville’s Marginalia, submitted in 1965. His thesis covered all Melville’s then-known marginalia. Cowen presented, in typescript, passages from volumes that Melville had marked or annotated, and then he reproduced in quasi-facsimile Melville’s signatures/dates of acquisition, scores, underlinings, distinctive marks of emphasis, and comments accompanying those marked passages. Though dozens of annotated volumes from Melville’s library have been recovered since 1965, quite a few with extensive and important marginalia, Cowen’s work remains valuable to scholarship today because many volumes covered by his dissertation, at Houghton and elsewhere, have not yet been digitized and mounted online.

Title page of Melville’s Marginalia, by Wilson Walker Cowen, 1965. Harvard University Archives, HU 90.8730.15

The importance of Cowen’s work was immediately understood, and commercial microfilm and, later, commercial print-on-demand versions were offered for sale. In 1987, the for-profit publisher Garland reproduced Cowen’s work on a reduced scale (two very large folio volumes, it’s true, but with four Cowen pages to one Garland page to capture those nearly 5,700 images). Microfilm, micro-print-on-demand, and commercially published versions are either no longer available on the first-hand market or not easily come-atable (a Hermanism) on the second-hand market (and chokingly expensive when they do appear). Beyond that, they are all awkward and eye-fatiguing to use.

My last act as retiring Bibliographical Editor of the scholarly website Melville’s Marginalia Online was to plan, fund (at an astonishingly low cost—thank you, Harvard Library Imaging Services), and set in motion the digitization of the Cowen dissertation.  Charles Wilson Cowen, WWC’s son, has given permission to both Melville’s Marginalia Online and Harvard Library for different protocols to make his father’s work and legacy available in an open-access environment. The digitizing work (those nearly 5,700 images) was completed in the spring of 2021; eleven huge PDFs were added, with unrestricted access, to the bibliographic record in HOLLIS earlier this fall; and a few weeks ago Harvard University Archives staff updated the record and added comprehensive contents notes to help scholars access particular volumes or PDFs with precision. Those PDFs are enormous and often take some time to load. Nevertheless, Cowen’s work is now available for all to study, with Melville’s Marginalia now permanently back “in print.”

The website Melville’s Marginalia Online (which you really should visit) offers contextual information on Melville’s reading and marginalia, fully digitized copies of dozens of annotated titles from Melville’s library, along with a definitive catalog of books known to have been owned or borrowed by Melville and his family. The listings are faithfully kept current, incorporating recent booksellers’ or auction offerings or surprise discoveries/recoveries. Integration of the Cowen files into MMO’s search and analysis protocols will take some time.  For now—though not ideal—searching the PDFs through HOLLIS will provide scholars and enthusiasts access from anywhere and on any platform to Cowen’s presentation of Melville’s interactions, pencil(usually)-in-hand, with other writers’ works.

Wilson Walker Cowen, undated.

For various forms of assistance and support, I am grateful to Charles W. Cowen, to Houghton Library staff, particularly Leslie Morris and Christine Jacobson in Modern Books and Manuscripts (the department that curates the Melville collection), to the editors and staff of Melville’s Marginalia Online, to Harvard Library Imaging Services (especially to my chief contact throughout the long project, Tom Lingner), and to Harvard University Archives staff (especially to Kate Bowers, who updated the HOLLIS record for Melville’s Marginalia and added those invaluable contents notes). Behind the Harvard staff members mentioned by name above stand whole teams of university librarians and administrators who help to see such projects to completion, advance scholarship, and open up Harvard-held resources to all.

Thanks to Dennis C. Marnon, retired Administrative Officer of Houghton Library, for contributing this post.