Selling Typee, Revised Edition

Thurlow Weed
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

He has given to truth, all the blandishments of imagination.

Thurlow Weed published this favorable, advance notice of the Revised Edition of Typee in the Albany Evening Journal on August 4, 1846. Accessible online at Fulton History and GenealogyBank.

Albany Evening Journal - August 4, 1846
via GenealogyBank

A New Edition of Typee.

Messrs. WILEY & PUTNAM have announced a new edition of TYPEE, that very charming Book which has attracted so much attention and excited such warm interest in England and America.

Mr. MELVILLE, in preparing the new Edition of his work, has, for the purpose of preserving the charm of the narrative unbroken, thrown out whatever interrupted it. There is nothing, therefore, extraneous or episodical in this Book--a book which is to be read by future, as Gil Blas, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe have been by past, generations.

But TYPEE has a merit above the works, we have named. To all that is delightful in these undying Romans, Mr. MELVILLE's work superadds the interest which belongs to history. He has given to truth, all the blandishments of imagination. In his hands a veritable narrative has been rendered strange, more exciting, and more beautiful than the happiest creations of fancy.

The new Edition will derive additional value from the fact that Mr. MELVILLE's ship-mate and fellow-wanderer "TOBY," whom so many believed an imaginary personage, has strangely turned up and furnishes a Sequel! Yes, these friends who met and separated so mysteriously, enjoyed a reunion at Rochester, about two weeks since, where they passed two or three days in comparing recollections, the results of which will be found in the Sequel to the second Edition.  --Albany Evening Journal, August 4, 1846

Despite his initial skepticism about the reality of Toby, Thurlow Weed aided in early promotion of Herman Melville's first book (the uncut edition) by reprinting generous "extracts" and commentary by Evert A. Duyckinck. Selected "extracts from this new book of adventure by Mr. Melville" appeared in The Albany Evening Journal on March 27, 1846--six days after Duyckinck reprinted them in the Morning News.  Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge University Press, 1995; 2009 in paperback) gives Duyckinck's notice in the Morning News of March 21, 1846 but not the reprinting in Albany by Thurlow Weed. The Albany version includes Melville's spicy paragraphs describing "A FLOTILLA OF MARQUESAN MERMAIDS" but omits two extracts along with the reviewer's comments (favorable, mostly) on Melville's treatment of missionaries. Weed even copied the introductory paragraph which refers at the start to a promise made previously in the Morning News, not the Albany Evening Journal:

We promised our readers some extracts from this new book of adventure by Mr. Melville. This modern Crusoe, it will be remembered, found his way to the Cannibal valleys of the Marquesas by deserting a whale ship. Here is a sketch of one of the intolerable grievances which led him to this desperate measure....

Albany Evening Journal - March 27, 1846, page 2
via GenealogyBank

Weed's sampling of the first edition ends abruptly on the next page with a transitional sentence, copied from the Morning News notice, after Melville's anecdote of "MRS. PRITCHARD'S DEFENCE OF THE FLAG AT TAHITI." The Albany version lacks the promised "farewell address" to the crew from chapter 6, synopsized in the original chapter headings (and the New York Morning News) as "A Specimen of Nautical Oratory." Also lacking, an extract on "A HOUSEKEEPER IN TYPEE" and two paragraphs of additional remarks by the New York City reviewer.

Albany Evening Journal - March 27, 1846, page 3
via GenealogyBank

The Madison, Wisconsin Democrat on April 18, 1846 reprinted the entire notice "From the New York Morning Express," including all the extracts.

For further reading and comparing, here is the Revised Edition courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library:



Later issues of the Revised Edition by Harper and Brothers are accessible online via Google Books

• https://books.google.com/books?id=wBpJAAAAcAAJ&pg

and the Internet Archive

• https://archive.org/stream/cu31924022146694

And here below is the earlier, un-expurgated edition of Typee in Wiley and Putnam's Library of American Books (Sequel included in this 1846 volume), courtesy of the Internet Archive: