Background of this Project
This project began for me in the Reading Room of the Houghton Library at Harvard University in 1984 when I had some extra time on a rainy afternoon after examining the art books from Herman Melville’s library that are preserved there. I called up the “Miscellaneous Box of Melville Materials” I had seen listed in the card catalog and was surprised to see, as I slowly thumbed through it, a memorandum indicating that Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman’s granddaughter, had donated three portfolios of engravings from his personal collection of art to the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1952. Scholars had known that Melville had collected prints, but until then no actual prints had surfaced. In 1986 I published an inventory and overview of the 278 prints that had been preserved in storage at the Berkshire Athenaeum. Since then, with the help of many Melville scholars, Melville descendants, and institutional archivists, I have been able to discover another 150 prints Melville is known to have collected, most of which are still being preserved in private and public collections whose contents I have inventoried and interpreted in a sequence of essays about the separate collections.
After publishing the essay on the prints at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Essays in Arts and Sciences in 1986, I learned about the 44 prints from a private collector that Harrison Hayford and William Reese had rescued from the wastebasket at an estate sale, leading to the essay on the Reese Collection published in the Harvard Library Bulletin in 1993. This essay was followed in the same journal by those on the Ambrose Group (1995), David Metcalf’s Prints and tile (1997), and the Melville Chapin Collection (2000), all of these made possible by Hershel Parker’s having mentioned to me that Priscilla Ambrose, a direct descendent of Herman Melville living in Virginia, had some prints from her great-grandfather she might be willing to let me see. That original trip to Virginia led to trips to examine prints being preserved by other Melville descendants in Maine, Massachusetts, Texas, and Ohio, resulting in a sequence of essays published in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville's Studies (2000, 2013, 2018).
As I continued to research and write various essays I had always hoped to bring them together in a book displaying all of Melville’s prints—which by the year 2000 had numbered more than 400. But scholarly books, especially heavily illustrated ones, were getting more and more expensive to publish. And I had become deeply involved in sequence of other multiyear projects devoted to Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick series, Melville and Frederick Douglass, Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s Moby-Dick opera, Moby-Dick and Emily Dickinson artworks created by my students created by my students and Northern Kentucky University, art acquisitions by the Melville Society Archive in New Bedford, and the untold story of Frederick Douglass and Cincinnati antislavery. During the summer of 2020 my work on the latter project paused long enough for me to think seriously about how to convert the half-written book on Melville’s print collection I had put on hold after seeing Heggie and Scheer’s opera in 2010 into a Digital Humanities project. Fortunately, Clementine Farrell, a student in my recent class on Moby-Dick and the Arts, was willing and able to join me.
Clementine Farrell was a Computer Science major and Honors minor who excelled in every aspect of the class on Moby-Dick and the Arts I taught during the 2020 Spring Semester. Our class had to move online after the pandemic shut down the campus during Spring Break, but Clementine and her classmates presented very impressive final projects at the end of the semester, hers being six separate paintings inspired by Moby-Dick itself. Here was a Computer Science major and Honors minor, about to become a junior, who would be a perfect partner in developing a Digital Humanities project in which literature, visual art, and computer science were equally essential.
Among my many colleagues who for thirty-five years have shared and enriched my interest in Melville and visual art, Sam Otter has had the keenest interest and expertise in the prints from Melville’s collection. In July 2020 he had recently completed a six-year tenure as editor of Leviathan and was therefore free to say yes when I asked if he would like to join Clementine and me in creating Melville’s Print Collection Online. Clementine joined me in presenting our site at the International Melville Society Conference in Paris, France, in June 2022 https://www.melvillesociety.org/news/international-melville-society-conference-report.
When Clementine completed her degree in Computer Science, Emily Godfrey, an Integrative Studies major, became our second undergraduate webmaster. We are all grateful for the essential support we have received from all of the programs and funding agencies listed in our acknowledgements section.
November 2025