Permissions and Acknowledgments

I am grateful to all those who own prints from Melville’s personal collection for the permission they gave me to publish reproductions of those images in various essays I have published beginning in 1986 and who have provided new permissions for their images when published online. Meeting the Melville descendants and library curators who have preserved these works and granted access so I could study and share them with the larger world has been one of the great pleasures of working on this project.

In the early stages of this project, before email or the internet, most of my exploratory work was necessarily face to face. Among the earlier generation who welcomed me into the world of Melville scholarship (I had written my dissertation on a non-literary subject), I am especially grateful for the advice and encouragement of Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Hershel Parker, and Harrison Hayford. Among the editors who published my essays about the print collection, I am grateful to Doug Robillard at Essays in Arts and Sciences, to Kenneth Carpenter at Harvard Library Bulletin, and to John Bryant and Sam Otter at Leviathan. Among those museum professionals who have enabled me to exhibit prints from Melville’s collection, I am especially grateful to Lee Heald at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Peter Neill at South Street Seaport, Ruth Degenhardt and Kathleen Reilly at the Berkshire Athenaeum, Catherine Reynolds and Betsy Sherman at Melville’s Arrowhead home, and Christine Kurpiel at the Tate Britain Museum.

All of my work in the expanding field of Melville and the Arts has benefitted greatly from the work of pioneering colleagues including Elizabeth Schultz, Douglas Robillard, Christopher Sten, Gail Coffler, Dennis Bertold, Athanasios Christodoulou, and all of my colleagues in creating and sustaining the Melville Society Cultural Project at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. All work I have been able to do beyond my local responsibilities as an English professor at Northern Kentucky University has been made possible by the very supportive succession of department chairs, college deans, and university provosts who have helped to support my research ever since my original appointment as Regents Professor in 1991. Although there is much that I still do not know about digital scholarship, I am grateful to John Bryant for inviting me to become a contributor to the early development of the Melville Electronic Library and its sequence of MEL Camp training sessions. I am also grateful to Steven Olsen-Smith and Melville’s Marginalia Online for having already shown what a project similar to the one we envision we can achieve.

Among those museum professionals who have welcomed me into the precious collections and arcane procedures of world-class print rooms and rare book archives, I am especially grateful to those at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Southwestern University in Texas, the Melville Memorial Room at the Berkshire Athenaeum, the Houghton Reading Room and Fogg Art Gallery at Harvard, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, the Rare Books department of the New York Public Library, the Reading Room of the British Museum, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the Print Room of Tate Britain Gallery. My research on this project has also been assisted by Eric Shanes, Vesta Curtis, Cecilia Powell, Ian Warrell, and Christopher Ohge in England; Claire Illouz and Neil Fiertag in France; Dr. Holm Bevers in Germany; Lynn de Graaf and Hinke Bakker in the Netherlands; Cecilia Bersani, Carlo Pietrageli, Gordon Poole, Mario Barbi, and Eros Stivani in Italy; Athanasios Christodoulou in Greece; Ilana Pardes in Israel; and Basem Ra’ad in Palestine.

Other colleagues throughout the United States, beyond those mentioned above, who have assisted my work on this project include Ann-Marie Harris and Alex Reczkowski at the Berkshire Athenaeum; Leslie Morris and Dennis Marnon at the Houghton Library; Lesley Herzberg at Arrowhead; Michael Dyer and Michael Lapides at the New Bedford Whaling Museum; William Reese in New Haven; Meredith Mann at the New York Public Library; Clifford Ross and Jack Putnam in New York City; Duncan Osborne in Dallas and Kathryn Stallard at Southwestern University; Miller Prosser and Sandra Schloen at the University of Chicago; Lynn Ambrosini at the Taft Museum; librarians at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, the University of Cincinnati, and the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati; and, especially Danny Lovell, Interlibrary Loan specialist at Northern Kentucky University.

As I drafted this entry in early August 2020, this project to create Melville’s Print Collection Online was only one month old. Even so, I was highly encouraged by the involvement of my co-creators Clementine Farrell at Northern Kentucky University and Samuel Otter at University of California - Berkeley, as well as by the interest that had already been shown by various colleagues in English Studies, Library Science, Art History, Computer Science, and Digital Humanities generally. At NKU, our work on this project has been assisted by the English Department, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Dean's Fund for Excellence at the College of Informatics, and the Center for Integrative Natural Science and Mathematics. We have also been assisted by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.