2026 Moby-Dick Marathon

Bodleian Battle-Pieces, donated by John S. Pierson

Bodleian Library. The window is of Arts end of the Duke Humfrey's Library.
Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1886 the Bodleian Library, Oxford received a substantial donation of Civil War books from Princeton grad John Shaw Pierson.

The exceptional number of donations from the United States in 1886 is mainly due to a collection of about 250 printed volumes relating to the American Civil War having been given by Mr. John S. Pierson of New York.  --The Bodleian Library in 1882-7 (Oxford, 1888). 

Donated books included the first edition of Herman Melville's volume of Civil War poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. 

• https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/f/89vilt/oxfaleph014073326

The Bodleian Battle-Pieces is digitized and accessible online courtesy of The Internet Archive.

At least one of the first-edition copies of Battle-Pieces at Princeton was also from John S. Pierson, who donated many thousands of Civil War books and pamphlets in the Pierson Civil War Collection.

JOLINE, JOHN F. “Special Collections at Princeton: VI. THE PIERSON CIVIL WAR COLLECTION.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 2, no. 3 (1941): 105–10. https://doi.org/10.2307/26400811.

Racy and entertaining

11 Apr 1849, Wed Boston Evening Transcript (Boston, Massachusetts) Newspapers.com

THE MESSRS HARPER promise us on Saturday the new work by Melville, author of "Typee" and Omoo." It is entitled "Mardi; and a Voyage Thither." Melville has already eclipsed De Foe in his racy and entertaining productions. His new book will have a great sale."  -- Boston Daily Evening Transcript, April 11, 1849

Both volumes of the first American edition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849) of Herman Melville's Mardi: and a Voyage Thither have been digitized by the great Internet Archive; the physical books are held by the University of Pittsburgh Library.

J. J. Woodward's Moby-Dick

Army Surgeon Joseph Janvier Woodward, M. D.
via U. S. National Library of Medicine

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University has the first American edition of Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, digitized by Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/mobydickorwhale01melv/page/144

and also available online courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library

The Rubenstein copy of the first American edition of Moby-Dick was donated by Richard and Nancy Riess. The descriptive entry for this volume notes, along with the tipped-in autograph of the author,

"the ownership signatures of J.J. Woodward and B.W. Huxley and the pencil initials W.D.C." 

Evidently this copy of Moby-Dick was owned (and possibly annotated) by Joseph Janvier Woodward (1833-1884), the distinguished Philadelphia surgeon and pioneering pathologist.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/visibleproofs/galleries/technologies/photomicrography_image_8.html

Woodward has been credited with the invention of photomicrography:

https://www.archivesofpathology.org/doi/full/10.1043/1543-2165%282005%29129%5B1313%3ASPITEO%5D2.0.CO%3B2

The physician J. J. Woodward was the son of Joseph Janvier Woodward (1798-1878). The initials "W. D. C." may belong with the signature--I guess they might stand for Washington, District of Columbia where Woodward after May 19, 1862 lived while working in the Surgeon General's Office. As an undergraduate J. J. Woodward wrote Ada: A Tale, published in 1852 under the pseudonym "Janvier."

https://books.google.com/books?id=Bnk7AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA1&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

For comparison with the signature in the Duke Moby-Dick, here are two similar looking autographs of the noted army surgeon and pathologist J. J. Woodward:

J. J. Woodward, 1865 autograph
via Smithsonian Institution
National Museum of American History

J. J. Woodward, 1881 signature via Ira & Larry Goldberg

"As a scientific investigator and thinker his especial characteristics were the incessant labor which he devoted to the subjects on which he was engaged and his desire to obtain his data at first hand as far as possible. His turn of mind was essentially that of a critic, and his first impulse on hearing of any alleged new fact or observation relating to matters in which he was interested was to doubt, and to attempt to verify it for himself."  --1885 Memoir of Joseph Janvier Woodward, 1833-1884 by J. S. Billings.

Woodward on Modern Philosophical Conceptions of Life:

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015005378834

Profile in The Bulletin of the U. S. Army Medical Department No. 48 (April 1939):

https://books.google.com/books?id=EFKgAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA105&lpg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Possibly Dr. Woodward was the reader of the Duke Moby-Dick who decided to "Skip" chapter 32, Cetology.

Other chapters with pencil markings include The Mast-Head, Monkey-Rope, Try-Works, Doubloon,  Dying Whale and Whale Watch; and The Candles.

In pen, one reader underscored the narrator Ishmael's lament in The Funeral over the gruesome spectacle of the whale's floating corpse under attack from sharks and scavenging seabirds:

Oh, horrible vultureism of earth!

Sat, Aug 23, 1884 – Page 2 · Evening Star (Washington, District of Columbia) · Newspapers.com
The physical book, call number PS2384 .M6 1851, is kept in the Vault. Here is the digitized version, conveniently accessible online via the great Internet Archive:

Willard Thorp's Herman Melville: Representative Selections

A treasure-trove of Melville's writings and Melville scholarship, valuable as ever eighty years on, and now more accessible than ever since getting Google-digitized. First published by the American Book Company in 1938, Willard Thorp's Melville offers a generous selection of poetry as well as prose, including the first publication of Melville's 1859 poem To Daniel Shepherd.

At least one copy (from University of California) is available online courtesy of

• HathiTrust Digital Library
  https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b4380152

and another from Digital Library of India via

• The Internet Archive
  https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.182829/2015.182829.Herman-Melville-Representative-Selectionswith-Introduction

Battle-Pieces

Online text:
Project Gutenberg EBook of Battle-Pieces

Scholarly editions:
Battle-Pieces, edited by Hennig Cohen - University of Michigan volume courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library

Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Published Poems by Herman Melville