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:

Discarded by the Public Library in Watertown: Piazza Tales, with marginal comment on Melville as "a great humbug"

In this letter to Philip Hale as editor of the "As the World Wags" column, Boston reader "G. E." reports on his purchase of an ex-library copy of The Piazza Tales. From the Boston Herald, Friday, September 23, 1921; found in the online Newspaper Archives at Genealogy Bank. Note the spelling: Melvillians!

Boston Herald - September 23, 1921

 

BENIGHTED WATERTOWN.

As the World Wags:

It would be unkind, if not unjust, to deposit the whole blame at your doorstep: however, you’ll find enough there to stumble over, if you ever cross your threshold to face an angry mob of Melvillians! Your well-intentioned propaganda costs us dearly. Prices have gone up sky high.

One bookseller in Boston can’t get the “Piazza Tales” for love or money. Another had a copy offered to him (first and apparently only edition) at $4.50. I politely declined. At last by the merest chance I obtained through him a copy marked “discarded”—mind you—by the Watertown public library; price $2. I’m not kicking. On the contrary, now that I have read the book, I’ll confess that it is worth those two iron men; and more.

But I am moved to reflect on the fact that Watertown had no use for these stories, and upon this extraordinary thing: At the end of that wonderfully uncomfortably tale about the poor, demented Scrivener, once employed in the Dead Letter Office, one Watertown reader (perhaps the one that recommended the book for the dump-heap) has indulged in the following pencilled opinion: “This Herman Melville is a great humbug.” As one of the converted, I would urge you therefore, move on to Watertown, and smite the Waterstownsman with your ire.

G. E.
Boston

Are booksellers able to procure for you Melville’s “Israel Potter,” The Confidence Man,” “Pierre, or the Ambiguities?” If so, at what price. A contributor to the Nation and Athenaeum of London states that the British Museum is without a copy of the “Piazza Tales.” These stories worked their strange spell on us when years ago we read them in Putnam’s Magazine, that monument to the fine taste of George William Curtis, the editor. Reading the tales again and again, we are at a loss to say which is the best. “The Bell Tower” has been reprinted in collections of short stories, yet we prefer “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno,” the account of Capt. Amasa Delano’s surprising adventures. Whenever a thunderstorm comes along, we think of “The Lightning Rod Man” and loathe the critic who, years ago, characterized it as “grotesque verbiage.” He probably came from Watertown. Ed. [Philip Hale]

In his reply, Hale references the June 11, 1921 issue of The Nation and The Athenaeum, where (after printing letters from Michael Sadleir and James Billson) the editor notes:

We believe that the British Museum has no copy of "The Piazza Tales." Verb. sap.

In 1881 The Watertown Free Public Library still boasted a first edition of The Piazza Tales.



As shown in the previous melvilliana post Forty Years of Philip Hale and Melville, Hale had been promoting Melville in the pages of the Boston Herald since 1904, not long after he moved there from the Boston Journal--where he had talked nonstop about Melville in "Talk of the Day." Doubtless Hale and his Boston reader are too hard on Watertown, Mass. According to the Librarian's Report for 1907, more than 700 volumes, many "among the most used and most popular books" in the library, had to be discarded as "worn out by constant and increasing usage." Moby-Dick and Typee are listed as 1907 additions to the 1881 catalog.

Scored in Melville's New Testament

These verses are marked in Luke 2, as shown at Melville's Marginalia Online:

9  And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid. 

10  And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. 

14  Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds / 1833-34, Thomas Cole
The Chrysler Museum of Art

Herman Melville lived in Albany from October 1830 to April 1838, so hey! he could have seen Cole's great new painting The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds when it was on display in City Hall (1834) or at the Albany Museum (1835). From the Albany Argus, Tuesday, March 18, 1834, reprinting early praise in the New York Evening Post (Thursday, March 13, 1834) for Cole's picture which was then on exhibit at the American Academy of Fine Arts: 

COLE has just executed a large picture of the Angel appearing to the shepherds of Bethlehem, which is now exhibiting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Barclay street. The right of the picture represents the towers, houses, and cottages of Bethlehem, grouped on the borders of a lake and drawn with great beauty of disposition and coloring. In the sky directly over the stable which is supposed to shelter the infant Saviour, is seen the miraculous star shedding its cool light over that part of the landscape, and partially reflected in the water below.—On the left of the picture appears the Angel floating on roseate clouds in the midst of a flush of light which seems to proceed from the opened heavens. Three shepherds occupy the foreground, one of whom is prostrate with his face on the earth, another appears just recovering from the awe and amazement excited by the glorious apparition, and a third, a venerable old man, stands leaning on his staff, gazing with an air of mingled curiosity and veneration at the spectacle, and listening to the proclamation of the reign of peace and benevolence uttered by the celestial messenger. This group is happily imagined and well executed. Around are scattered their flocks over a broken rocky country, and in the distance other shepherds with their flocks are all descried. The contrast between the solemnity and repose of the right hand portion of the picture and the splendor of the left has a delightful effect. The work does great credit to the genius and skill of Mr. Cole.—[ N. Y. Evening Post.

Wyn Kelley on Melville and Margins

As you might have guessed by now, we don't really get regular news here on the prairie.

For anybody else who missed the great Unbound symposium back in May 2012, MIT has video and podcasts of, among other exciting events, three different panels offering 

"Speculations on the Future of the Book."

The first panel of May 4, 2012 included Melville scholar Wyn Kelley who examined "the margin as a creative space for writers, critics, and artists" in her presentation (starting at 42:12), “Leaving an Open Margin: the Example of Herman Melville."

• https://futurebook.mit.edu/
• https://futurebook.mit.edu/2012/05/1009/ 

Marginalia in Melville's lost Seneca (1620 second edition, not 1614?)

Looking for lost notes in a burned-up book? Leyda's grand old Log to the rescue, once again! VOLUME ONE gives the following marginalia in that lost volume of Seneca--the one Carl Haverlin used to have. In 1951 it was still in Haverlin's collection. And hold up, Leyda identifies this book as the second "Newly Inlarged and Corrected" edition of 1620. But as listed in the catalog at Melville's Marginalia Online, Sealts #457 is the 1614 first edition. Which is it? Or which was it? What fun it was to see the 1614 edition at Hathi Trust Digital Library, but maybe that's the wrong one. No luck yet turning up the1620 edition. Bauman Rare Books had the second edition for sale, but unfortunately somebody beat us to it. Anyway, Leyda assigns these markings and comments to the year 1848, reporting them as Melville's additions to very early annotations in this very old book:

On Epistle XIII M comments:
What a glorious confidance of Fame!
But how many have thought thus, yea written thus, & have been belied by the Future.

In the margin of the following page M comments:
Surely, if these things were recorded in Holy Writ, what force they would carry. It is indeed undeniable, that in Seneca & other of the old philosophers, we meet with maxims of actual life, & lessons of practical wisdom which not only equal but exceed any thing in the Scriptures.—But behold the force of example, & its omnipotence over mere precepts however lofty. Seneca's life belied his philosophy; But that of Christ went beyond his own teachings.

In "Of Providence," Chapter III M checks & scores the passage beginning:
There is nothing, saith [Demetrius the Stoick], more vnhappie then that man that hath neuer beene touched with aduersitie: for he hath not had the means to know himselfe.
M's comment: Glorious.

At the beginning of Chapter IV M scores:
Prosperitie falleth into the hands of the common sort, & betideth those of basest spirit: but to yoake and master calamities and mortall terrours, is the propertie of a great man.
M's comment on this has been cut from the page.

--The Melville Log, Volume 1 [285]

Searching at AbeBooks.com I see Old Erie Street Bookstore in Cleveland is offering the 1620 second edition of Seneca's Works in good condition for $1,950. Hesperia Libros of Zaragoza (Spain) has one for US $1,176.03.

Related post:

• Herman Melville's burned-up Seneca