Introduction

Methods change, but the goal remains the same: to generate and disseminate knowledge in the broadest and most interesting way to the broadest potentially interested audience. That was certainly Herman Melville’s goal in publishing Moby-Dick in 1851, and it has been my own in the development and launch of Melville’s Print Collection Online (MPCO), an online repository begun in 2020 to display, catalog, and interpret 420 prints from Herman Melville’s art collection for interested viewers and readers around the world. ^[1]

In this article, I will share some of my experience as an old-school Melville scholar who is grateful to be living, teaching, and writing in the digital age. Teaching, scholarly publication, and librarianship have all changed dramatically since 1972, when I began my career as a professor of American literature after defending the doctoral dissertation I wrote on an Underwood typewriter with carbon paper.

Then, many professors lectured to passive students; now, my students post discussion board comments before class, interact during class, and make their own presentations during the semester and in final projects.

Then, most scholarly essays and books were typed out on paper to be read in printed publications; now, many scholarly essays and books are both written and read entirely online.

Then, librarians were custodians of scholarly books and essays printed on paper and preserved on shelves or in storage rooms; now, they are disseminators, recipients, and repositories of digital information that whizzes around the world at the touch of a button.

Ishmael declares in the “Cetology” chapter that “I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans.” ^[2] The digital age has expanded the oceans of knowledge and revolutionized our navigation through them, enabling our evolving digital site to reach “all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth.” ^[3] This digital site allows us to see the world as Melville saw it through the prints he collected (see fig. 1). ^[4]

I: From Houghton Library to the Berkshire Athenaeum

In 1984, I arrived at the Houghton Library Reading Room to examine its unparalleled collection of books from Herman Melville’s library, more than 100 of which had been donated by his granddaughter Eleanor Melville Metcalf in 1942. I had published my book Jane Austen and Mozart the year before and I was beginning to examine Melville’s interest in visual art and in seascapes by J. M. W. Turner. Houghton Library was the obvious place to start because it had an impressive number of books on visual art that had survived from Melville’s library, including Cosmo Monkhouse’s book on Turner. ^[5] Many of Melville’s books had his own markings and annotations, and the only way then to study those was to examine the books themselves at Houghton Library or to consult “Melville’s Marginalia,” Walker Cowen’s extraordinary, unpublished, 11-volume 1965 Harvard dissertation, then also available only at Houghton. ^[6]

I was glad to spend several days in the Reading Room because there was so much to see and assimilate. Melville’s annotations of interest were not limited to his books on art. The most significant one for me at the time was written on the title page of his copy of the 1839 London edition of Thomas Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839): “Turner’s pictures of whalers were suggested by this book.” ^[7]

The above annotation was the first evidence I had found that Melville was aware of the four oil paintings of whaling scenes that Turner had exhibited in London in 1845 and 1846. Additional annotations in the front matter of Beale’s book indicated that Melville had imported it from London on July 10, 1850. Taken together, these annotations showed that Melville had known about Turner’s whaling paintings a year before he published Moby-Dick in October of 1851. This knowledge was essential for the essay on Melville and Turner I published in Turner Studies and for my book Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (1992). ^[8] I was glad I had been able to examine Beale’s actual book in the Reading Room because Cowen had mistranscribed “whalers” as “whales.” ^[9]

I had finished my work in the middle of the afternoon on my last day and it was raining hard outside. Houghton then had a physical card catalog. When I began to look through it, I saw a card for a “Miscellaneous Box of Melville Materials.” When I began thumbing through the papers in the box, I saw that Eleanor Melville Metcalf had donated three portfolios of prints from Herman Melville’s personal collection of art to the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1952. One of Melville’s obituaries in 1891 had mentioned that he had assembled a collection of prints and engravings, among which prints after Claude Lorrain were his “favorites,” ^[10] but until I saw this memorandum of his granddaughter Eleanor’s donation, I had seen no evidence that any of his prints had survived or, if so, where they were. When I left the Reading Room that afternoon, the portrait of Melville by J. O. Eaton that still greets visitors to Houghton was speaking to me in a new way. ^[11]

As soon as I was back home in northern Kentucky, I telephoned the Berkshire Athenaeum to ask how many prints they had and whether any were after paintings by Turner. They did not know, because there had been no proper inventory: Melville was literature and the prints were art. When I got to Pittsfield, I found that the three portfolios contained nearly three hundred prints being preserved in a large paper bag in a storage room. As I examined them one by one, I was delighted to find that 19 were after paintings by Turner (see fig. 2) ^[12] , but surprised that none were after paintings by Claude Lorrain. Most of the prints were after paintings by European Old Masters and many of them related to Melville’s own travels and writings. Many of the 278 prints had no indication of artist, engraver, title, date, or publisher; I decided that the first thing I should do would be to identify each one as well as I could and then publish an itemized inventory, even though that would leave little room for commentary on individual prints. This I did in the essay “Melville’s Prints and Engravings at the Berkshire Athenaeum” that appeared in the June 1986 issue of Essays in Arts and Sciences . [13]

II: From Melville's Descendants and Collectors to HLB

After publishing my essay on the prints at the Berkshire Athenaeum I heard that the Melville book collector William Reese in New Haven had several books from Melville’s library in his own private collection, including William Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art (1844). After Bill invited me to examine the Hazlitt book, I learned that he had recently acquired 44 prints from Melville’s art collection that had been discovered in a wastebasket at a house sale in Pittsfield. Two (Guido’s Beatrix Cenci and Watteau’s Finette ) were Old Master prints related to Melville’s life and writing, and another was one of the few American prints that have survived from Melville’s collection (Deas’s The Death Struggle ); all of them were valuable supplements to the prints I had already inventoried and written about, many of which were British topographical and architectural views.

Bill agreed to my idea of writing an essay about the 44 prints he had rescued and was now preserving; the question remained of where to try to publish it. My primary goal was to find a scholarly publication that would do pictorial and intellectual justice to the prints. Harvard Library Bulletin was my obvious first choice. This journal published substantial and very well illustrated essays on its oversized, high-quality pages. The Bulletin also had access to images in books from Melville’s library at Houghton that could supplement my discussion of individual prints. This journal had published the scholarship on Melville I most wanted to emulate, the essays and checklists on “Melville’s Reading” that Merton M. Sealts, Jr., had published between 1948 and 1950. ^[14] Sealts had done for Melville’s reading what I hoped to do for his print collection, so I was delighted when Kenneth E. Carpenter, then editor of Harvard Library Bulletin , decided to publish my essay, “The Reese Collection,” in the Fall 1993 issue. ^[15]

After publishing the inventory of the prints Eleanor Metcalf had donated to the Berkshire Athenaeum, I had of course begun to wonder if any more prints from Melville’s collection had survived among his direct descendants. At some point, Melville biographer Hershel Parker mentioned that Herman’s great-granddaughter in Virginia, Priscilla Osborne Ambrose, had once said something about having a few prints from his collection. Priscilla was the daughter of Frances Cuthbert (Thomas) Osborne, younger sister of Eleanor Melville (Thomas) Metcalf. When she graciously invited me to her home, I was delighted to see that she had engravings after two major seascapes by J. M. W. Turner ( Calais Pier and Dutch Boats in Gale ) and two major seascapes after Claude Lorrain ( Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba and View of a Sea Port during a Sun-set ). She also had three Italian landscapes from Melville’s collection, two after Herman van Swanevelt and one after Richard Wilson. All these prints related closely to Melville’s travels or writings, and Harvard Library Bulletin was again generous in allowing contextualizing commentary and illustrations. ^[16]

Other direct descendants of Herman Melville were preserving prints from his personal collection. ^[17] I learned from Priscilla Ambrose that her nephew Duncan Osborne had donated four prints from Melville’s collection to the Osborne Collection of Melville Materials at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. She also mentioned that David Metcalf, a son of Eleanor Melville Metcalf, was preserving two prints and a Persian tile. When I visited David and his wife Audrey in Maine, I saw three remarkable objects: Melville’s copy of Piranesi’s Arch of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius , his engraving after Raphael’s Loggia at the Vatican, and a colorfully painted Persian tile of a prince riding on a white horse through a flowering landscape with a beautiful bird high above him. Each of these three objects was exceedingly rich in associations with Melville’s life and writing. My essay on David Metcalf’s collection in Harvard Library Bulletin ^[18] included a photograph of David’s mother Eleanor as a young woman, standing next to Melville’s writing desk examining one of the books she was helping to preserve from his library and which she would later donate to Houghton (see fig. 3). ^[19]

From David Metcalf I learned about Bart Chapin, another direct descendant in Maine who had inherited prints from Melville’s collection. Chapin’s mother was Jeanette Ogden (Thomas) Chapin, another younger sister of Eleanor Melville (Thomas) Metcalf. Bart, his wife Jane, and three of their children were preserving 37 prints after Old Master paintings by Italian, French, Dutch, German, and British artists. One of three framed engravings was after a landscape by Nicolas Poussin. This collection had four prints after paintings by Claude Lorrain and three after paintings by Turner. Bart liked the idea of my writing an essay on his collection, so he recommended a local photographer I could take them to when I returned to Maine. My essay on the Bart Chapin family collection appeared in the March 2000 issue of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies . ^[20] Four of its 18 illustrations were in color, one of those being Venus et Amours , an aquatint printed in “sanguine” after a drawing by François Boucher (see fig. 4). ^[21]

While I was in Maine, Bart Chapin told me that his older brother Mel—short for Melville—had about the same number of prints from Melville’s collection as he did. At Mel and Elizabeth Chapin’s Massachusetts home, the first images I saw were two large, framed engravings after paintings by Claude Lorrain right in their living room. One of these, William Woollett’s engraving after Claude’s The Enchanted Castle , is one of the most celebrated images in the history of English printmaking. Melville Chapin had at least two dozen other prints he had inherited from the collection of his namesake great-grandfather, but some of these were difficult to sort out from some 200 images from his and Elizabeth’s merged family collections. He had 21 verifiable prints from Herman Melville’s collection, seven after paintings by Claude Lorrain, with other highly interesting images after Della Bella, Watteau, Turner, Cuyp, Stanfield, and others. My essay on Mel Chapin’s collection in the Summer 2000 issue of Harvard Library Bulletin was a welcome companion to the essay about his brother Bart’s collection in Leviathan . ^[22]

III: From an Abandoned Monograph to a Living Digital Site

After publishing the separate essays on the prints being preserved by Bart and Mel Chapin at the beginning of our new century, I had reached the point Merton Sealts had reached after publishing his essays about Melville’s reading a half century earlier. It was now time to convert my sequence of essays about more than 400 prints from Melville’s art collection into a book that would consolidate and integrate the whole. The pleasure and challenge of this undertaking was to extend through the first decade of the 21st century.

Discovering, documenting, and selectively reproducing and interpreting more than 400 prints from Melville’s collection in a variety of essays over a 15-year period had been an exciting and satisfying scholarly project. But Melville’s prints were being preserved in public and private collections in five different states, and he had left no record himself of the contents of his collection or of what it had meant to him. To imagine the influence the print collection might have had on Melville’s imagination and artistry, I would have to view it as an integrated whole. The only way to do this was to reconstruct its disparate surviving parts into the living repository of images and associations that he had enjoyed in his own home until his death in 1891.

It could be argued that the six major essays published in three different journals—briefly discussed in the previous section of this essay—gave a good enough sense of Melville’s collection as a whole. You could create a substantial book or monograph on the collection simply by printing all six essays consecutively. If you did that, though, you would have to sort through all six essays to find the 32 prints after J. M. W. Turner or the 16 prints after Claude Lorrain, most of which were listed but not illustrated. After performing either of those operations, you would then have to arrange all the Turners or all the Claudes in some sort of meaningful way to see what they added up to or what they might have meant to Melville. You would similarly have to sort through all six essays to find all the prints pertaining to ancient Greece and the Near East, or all the prints pertaining to ancient Rome and modern Italy, or all the prints pertaining to three centuries of French painting. The only way to see such a collection as a whole would be to imaginatively reassemble its original components, divide them into meaningful parts, and create relationships within and among those parts.

In the case of Melville’s print collection, that meant freeing the 400-plus prints from the essays in which they had already been identified and then rearranging them in a way that would help to reveal their import to Melville while also encouraging new scholarly insights. To borrow the language of chapter 89 of Moby-Dick , you would have to make  each of Melville’s prints into a “loose fish” by releasing it from the essay to which it is now “fast,” and then to make it a new kind of “fast fish” by putting it into a new and broader set of relationships. To arrange someone else’s collection of objects into meaningful sets is to attempt to reverse engineer the acts of the imagination that had bought those objects together. Such a reorganization recognizes, in the words of Susan M. Pearce, that “collections are sets of objects … and they are an act of the imagination.” ^[23]

By the time my essays on the prints being separately preserved by the Chapin brothers had appeared in Leviathan and Harvard Library Bulletin , my book on Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick series had been published. ^[24] I was now free to begin the process of converting my previous research on Melville’s print collection into a book that could catalog, display, and interpret his entire collection. I plunged into this process for much of the next decade with great pleasure. I divided the prints into the kind of national and geographical groupings most commonly recognized in Melville’s day, beginning with ancient Greece and the Near East and then moving through the Italian, French, Dutch, German, and English schools of painting and printmaking before concluding with the American. Within each of these groupings, I arranged the prints chronologically by artist or thematically by subject. I learned much more about each print, each artist, and each artistic school as I brought them together and wrote headnotes for each section and catalog entries for each print. Only then did I begin to get a sense of what the collection as a whole might have meant to Melville.

By January 2010, I had written section headings and catalog entries for 230 of the 400-plus prints. I had nearly reached the end of the chapter on Dutch and Flemish artists (the fourth of eight projected chapters), but it had taken more than 600 typed, double-spaced pages to get that far. Publishers I consulted had been interested in the subject but were daunted both by the length of the text and the cost of reproducing so many prints. I began to realize that the book I was writing was unpublishable. I did not want to chop it up and publish only selections from the collection, for I had come to feel that each print had been important to Melville and was thus potentially important to us. So, I reluctantly abandoned the project and spent most of that new decade researching and writing a book on the Moby-Dick opera by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer that premiered in Dallas in 2010, ^[25] followed by a series of essays on Frederick Douglass and Cincinnati antislavery.

My work on Melville’s print collection was suddenly revived after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic during the spring semester of 2020. Clementine Farrell was a sophomore computer science major in my Honors class “ Moby-Dick and the Arts.” Our face-to-face class had to move online at mid-semester, but she and her classmates continued to do excellent work. For her final project, Clementine created six impressive paintings interpreting various elements of the novel. And I began to think about reviving the abandoned book on Melville’s print collection. Dramatic progress in the field of digital humanities had made me wonder if that unpublishable book project could be converted to some kind of digital site, but I was entirely lacking in the kind of expertise that would have been required to do so. Here, suddenly, was an excellent Honors student and Computer Science major with impressive skills in reading 19th-century literature and creating visual art.

When I asked Clementine at the end of the semester if she would like to be the webmaster for a site on Melville’s print collection, she said yes. We began our work in June of 2020; by the end of the summer, Samuel Otter (University of California, Berkeley), who had just finished a six-year term as editor of Leviathan , joined us as our third co-creator. By January 2022 we had completed 120 of our projected 420 catalog entries and two of our eight projected chapters and had published our evolving site on the Digital Resources page of the Melville Society website . By June 2022, we had completed two-thirds of chapter 3, “Three Centuries of French Painting,” part of which we presented at the 13th International Melville Society Conference in Paris, France.

Working on this site has been even more satisfying than I had hoped, but the learning curve has at times been steep. In the rest of this essay, I will share some of the major steps in the process of creating this site, and some of the improvements we hope to make as it continues to evolve.

IV: Challenges and Rewards of Digital Scholarship

The first thing Clementine and I had to decide when we began this project was how to pay her for her time. I paid her from my personal funds for the summer months in 2020. Since then, she was able to work 10 hours a week with a series of semester-long grants from NKU’s College of Arts and Sciences, NKU’s College of Informatics, NKU's Center for Integrative Natural Science and Mathematics, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

Another early question was what digital platform to use for our site. After consulting with NKU University Archivist Lois Hamill, we chose Omeka , which extends its functionality by allowing users to install plug-ins to customize the structure of their site. We chose the Exhibits plug-in because it allowed a larger focus on the content of the site, enabling us to create chapters in which each catalog entry easily combines text and image. In addition to hosting the Omeka content management system, Omeka.net offered a free trial with up to 500MB storage that we found very helpful as we began to design and develop our site. ^[26]

As our demo site grew and needed more space, we moved to Reclaim Hosting . Here we were able to load the Omeka content management system under a domain name and build our full-scale site. Reclaim Hosting runs on a yearly subscription rate that is affordable to educators and students because part of its mission is to support the work of educational institutions. ^[27] We found Reclaim Hosting to be an excellent resource for our current needs and anticipated growth: the platform was flexible in the kind of sites it could host and maintain, supporting both Omeka and other types of content management systems.

The biggest challenge I encountered as a Melville scholar was how to adapt the research and writing originally designed for publication within the covers of a book to a digital format. I wanted to document, display, and interpret the prints in Melville’s collection with the same scholarly depth but in a more accessible way. I have been delighted to learn that the digital platform enables me to achieve each of these goals much more effectively than a print publication.

One drawback of creating an online scholarly site as comprehensive as this is that you cannot expect your reader to read it through from start to finish the way you might with a book. Individual catalog entries and headnotes need to be self-contained; at the same time, you are trying to create as much continuity as you can for the reader who does want a more comprehensive or continuous experience. You cannot count on one general bibliography, list of works cited, or list of illustrations to serve the entire project in the way they would in a book; the digital reader needs to be able to navigate the site in a local as well as a global context. Even so, a digital platform enhances both the local and global components of such a project in multiple ways that can be only briefly listed here.

Perhaps the most dramatic advantage of a digital platform such as ours is that you can publish significant parts of it before you have completed the whole. If we were halfway through an eight-chapter book, our potential audience might have to wait several more years before seeing a single word or image in print. On the digital platform we can publish each major component part as it is completed. Unlike in a printed book, we can also correct or revise portions we have already published, and we can benefit from insights from readers and viewers as we move ahead.

Another huge advantage for a project like ours is that there is no commercial limit to the number of words or images we can use on the site. Publishing this project as a printed book was doomed because no print publisher could afford produce a book that reproduced 420 prints from the art collection of a 19th-century novelist supported by a like number of catalog entries and interpretive texts. On the digital platform, we can publish as much commentary and display as many images as the subject requires. We can supplement Melville’s black-and-white engraving of a painting he had seen in a gallery with a color reproduction of the painting itself. ^[28] And, in today’s age of open access, we can display digital images from most major museums without having to request, or pay for, permission.

Both the scholarly content and visual display of our site are exponentially richer than they could have been before the digital age. We are literally sailing through oceans of knowledge as opposed to fishing from the shore. When I was researching CAT 1, Persian and Greek Medals (fig. 5) ^[29] , for the projected book on the print collection, I could not find out where it had been published despite sending air-mail letters—and later, email queries—to leading curators in England. Very soon after beginning our digital project in the summer of 2020, Sam Otter discovered that this print had been published as part of an essay in the Encyclopædia Londinensis in 1816 that identified each of the 15 images and contextualized the ancient cultures in which they had each been created. Not only was this invaluable information about the medals themselves, it was information that had been potentially available to Melville himself, either when visiting London in 1849 and 1857 or in libraries in New York.

If the above print had been included in the projected book on Melville’s collection, even in a full-page reproduction, each of the 15 images would have been difficult to see in detail. On our site, Clementine was able to display an enlarged figure for each image that greatly enhanced what could be discussed in the accompanying commentary. Our “exhibit” layer for each catalog entry introduces the image itself with a caption, followed by commentary and any other necessary or desirable images. Clicking on the primary image takes you down to the “catalog” layer where you have not only detailed documentation of the print itself and the source of our reproduction, but also an image of the print that can be searched in detail with our roving zoom function. Today’s digital viewer is often able to examine a print more closely than Melville himself could have done with a magnifying glass.

Although our primary focus is on the prints in Melville’s art collection, all elements of his life as a poet, novelist, traveler, and book collector are continually at play, not only in our commentary on each print on the Exhibit level of our site but in the hyperlinks and metadata on the Catalog level. If this project had been published as a printed book, the decision to catalog the prints in Melville’s collection primarily by national school would have precluded any other way of systematically comparing and contrasting them. With the hyperlinks and metadata on our digital site, we can tag each print by artist, engraver, print medium, publisher, language, country, owner, subject, or family association and immediately compare that print with others in the same category. We can also link all our references to individual writings by Melville. One of my favorite elements of the tag function is the page which displays all our tag subjects in alphabetical order, any one of which can be activated across the entire site. ^[30]

Although Houghton Library owns no prints from Melville’s art collection, the books it does own from Melville’s library play an essential role on our site in showing the intimate relation between his visual imagination and his literary imagination. Melville’s prints after artists including Raphael, Claude, Meissonier, Rembrandt, and Turner are directly illuminated by engravings in books from his library solely devoted to those artists. ^[31] Houghton also has several general books about art from Melville’s collection, such as The Wonders of Engraving by Georges Duplessis and The Works of Eminent Masters , whose texts and engravings illuminate Melville’s prints after a variety of artists. ^[32] Melville’s 16 prints after Claude Lorrain included three etchings by Claude himself. ^[33] Melville’s copy of The Wonders of Engraving , now at Houghton, reproduces Claude’s own etching of a seaport at sunrise (fig. 6) ^[34] , a perfect supplement to Melville’s copy of Richard Earlom’s engraving of Claude’s Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (fig. 1 above). Together, those two sunrise images support the assertion that Claude Lorrain, “whether he be considered as a painter or engraver … is the greatest interpreter of nature the world has ever produced” ^[35] :

Such is the range of Melville’s imagination that other books not about art from his library at the Houghton also illuminate his print collection in sometimes unexpected ways. We have already mentioned the annotation about “Turner’s pictures of whalers” in Melville’s copy of Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale , Sealts no. 52. Melville’s 16-volume Boston edition of Lord Byron’s Life and Works now at Houghton features beautifully engraved frontispieces and title-page images after J. M. W. Turner. ^[36] Edwin Finden’s steel engraving after Turner’s watercolor of Santa Maria della Spina in Pisa is the frontispiece in volume 5 of Melville’s copy of the Life of Lord Byron now at Houghton (fig. 7). ^[37] Melville admired this “Sea-Chapel on river side” when visiting Pisa in 1857. ^[38] We reproduce this image in the “Italian Sightseeing” section of our “Parting Thought” to his prints after Italian Renaissance Artists in chapter 2. ^[39]

To emphasize the degree to which images in Melville’s book collection enriched his experience of images in his print collection, we created “Melville Book Boxes” as a special feature on our site. ^[40] Many of the engravings featured in the Book Boxes for the first three chapters are from books now at Houghton. Claude’s Sunrise etching from the Duplessis book (fig. 6 above) is the subject of Book Box 3.1. Book Box 1.4 reproduces the image of Elihu Vedder’s The Sorry Scheme from the deluxe edition of Vedder’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám that Melville acquired late in life, one of the many books that his granddaughter Eleanor donated to Houghton. ^[41] Vedder’s drawing of The Sorry Scheme (fig. 8) ^[42] depicts an elderly man and a young angel mourning the death of a young bird alongside three numbered quatrains from the Rubáiyát beneath the image of a bird of prey.

Our commentary on this drawing notes that Melville’s young granddaughter Eleanor, in the years following his death, copied drawings from his copy of Vedder’s Rubáiyát while sitting at his writing desk. In her adult years, Eleanor Melville Metcalf embodied the “wingèd Angel” of Vedder’s drawing and quatrain 99, doing more than anyone else to “arrest” the “Roll of Fate” that had seemingly consigned her grandfather to literary oblivion. ^[43] The “Love” of her “Heart’s Desire” resulted in the publication of Billy Budd (1924) and the biography of Melville she subtitled Cycle and Epicycle (1953); the donation of Melville’s books to Houghton and his prints to the Athenaeum; and the challenge to the rest of us to see Melville’s life in the multidimensional way she helped to make possible.

Melville Book Box 1.4 is associated with CAT 69, which features the Persian tile Melville brought back from the Near East in 1857 (fig. 9). ^[44] That tile was donated to Melville’s Arrowhead home in Pittsfield by David Metcalf, who had inherited it from his mother Eleanor. This beautifully painted tile molded in low relief has rich biographical associations with Melville’s travel in the Near East in 1857 and rich literary associations with the copies of Sa’di’s Gûlistân and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám he acquired later in life. Pictorially, this same Persian tile relates to his prints of Persian and Greek Medals and of King Solomon and his Queen in their enclosed garden. ^[45] The flourishing Persian garden in the tile contrasts with the depleted one in the opening quatrain that Vedder transcribed into his Sorry Scheme , and the beautiful, mythical Huma bird gliding high overhead contrasts with the bird of prey perched over the verses in Vedder’s drawing. ^[46]

If read in relation to each other, our entries for CAT 69 and MBB 1.4 show the kind of continuity and relatedness we are attempting to achieve on our site even though the entries are themselves free-standing and self-sufficient.

V: Prospects

We have enjoyed the process of creating Melville’s Print Collection Online during the last three years, but there is much more left to do. Our primary goal is to continue to post one catalog entry after another, and complete one chapter after another, until we have been able to document, display, and interpret Melville’s entire collection. As we do so, we will assimilate as much as we can from advances in digital scholarship, especially in the field we are now beginning to call Digital Melville.

We have already benefitted a great deal from two digital initiatives that preceded our own: the Melville Electronic Library (MEL), founded by John Bryant at Hofstra University, and Melville’s Marginalia Online (MMO), founded by Steven Olsen-Smith at Boise State University. ^[47] We have collaborated with each of these sites in getting ours underway. We have also explored, in a preliminary way, methods of making our three sites more interoperative as MEL establishes a new home for its multifaceted operations as part of the Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research (CEDAR) initiative at the University of Chicago. ^[48] Our three sites are side-by-side on the Digital Resources page of the Melville Society website. ^[49] In June of 2022, we presented our three projects in a session at the International Melville Society Conference in Paris. In June of 2023, our sites were featured in a special issue of Leviathan , “Digital Melville.” ^[50]

In our own local activity at Northern Kentucky University, Clementine, upon her graduation, has been succeeded by Emily Godfrey, an Integrative Studies major. The collaborative grant we received from NKU’s Center for Integrative Natural Science and Mathematics has enabled us to work with computer science professor Nicholas Caporusso and one of his students. One of our mutual goals is to develop the prototype for a 3-D “gallery” that will simulate the experience of walking through galleries that Melville actually visited.  He will also advise us on enabling users to interact with our site.

In “Sailing On,” chapter 169 of Mardi (1849), Melville’s third novel, published two years before Moby-Dick , the narrator confesses that “I’ve chartless voyaged” after being “driven from my course by a blast resistless.” That blast had driven him deeply into “the world of mind.” ^[51] By the end of that same year, young Melville was roving through the picture galleries of London and Paris, gazing at a profusion of authentic Old Master paintings for the first time in his life. Thus began the pictorial fusion of his mind and eyes that enriched his life as a traveler, author, book collector, and print collector for the next 42 years. Now, the digital world allows us to chart this pictorial element of Melville’s lifelong voyage through “the world of mind” with more precision, vision, and wonder than was previously possible.