Melville's Letters, Journals

I'm rather curious why Herman Melville's letters and journals have never been assembled in an LOA edition. It would certainly be welcome. These are hard to find. The exclusion of his poetry is also a head-scratcher.

>1 wordrubble:

Library of America has a commitment from (and to) the editors of the Northwestern-Newberry edition to publish the complete poems of Melville once they had finished gathering and collating the poems for their 15-volume scholarly edition of Melville’s works. They published the authoritative edition of “Clarel” (volume 11) in 1992, the “Published Poems” (volume 12) in 2009, and in December they just issued the final volume, “Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings” (volume 13), which includes all of the unpublished, unfinished, and fragmentary poems.

In sum, the long wait is over, and we will be publishing the first-ever, single-volume edition of Melville's complete poetry in the Spring of 2019.

It's unlikely we could reprint Melville's journals and letters (like those of Thoreau and Hawthorne, which we also hope to publish) without significant financial support, since the sales (alas) would be minuscule. Fortunately, Melville's journals and letters are, in fact, still readily available in the Northwestern-Newberry editions, both in paperback and in hardcover. (See: https://www.amazon.com/Writings-Herman-Melville-Vol-15/dp/0810108232 and https://www.amazon.com/Correspondence-Fourteen-Scholarly-Melville-Herman/dp/0810...

--David

Great information as ever, David.

I'm curious generally, but also with respect to Melville's journals and letters specifically: is a financial benefactor something that will be sought for such writings by an important author? Generally is such a project considered somewhat likely to appear, or exceedingly unlikely?

Basically, I'm wondering if it's part of the LOA mission to make a case for these types of publications, and seek them out, or rather if such projects are presumed not to materialise except in rare instances when a benefactor steps foreward and makes the specific request.

>3 elenchus::

Our staff and board members maintain a list of projects for which we seek funding, and we approach (rather aggressively, in fact) foundations, other individuals, and institutions that might be interested in funding those projects. A recent example is the John Quincy Adams edition, which we hoped to do but could not until we received underwriting.

A few representative examples of items for which we are currently seeking funding can be seen on this page: https://loa.org/support/project-support. The Melville poetry edition has not yet been funded, but we're taking the leap and going ahead with it anyway.

It's rare (to the point of nonexistence) that someone steps forward out of the blue to offer support for a specific project they'd like us to do. I can think of two examples, however, when we were offered support to publish authors our advisors had not proposed for the series--and we turned them down.

-- David

Thank you for the update. That's a shame about the journals and letters. I recently watched a Melville documentary from the 80s and was struck by the beauty of the prose in the letters. The material needs to be available in a handsome edition that reflects its quality and importance.

I'll look forward to the edition of Melville's poetry.

On another note, I'm excited by the possibility of a collection of Sondheim's lyrics. What a grand idea for a book.

>5 wordrubble: That is a project that might well attract funding if Sondheim's works are considered good enough for LOA. If it means anything, I like them.

Edit: Oops, I just looked at the project-support page and saw Sondheim lyrics listed. I guess they are considered good enough. :-)