I hitchhiked to Pittsfield from New York in the summer of 1962 to study Melville. Often I worked in an empty library, the great old Athenaeum, until throngs of children arrived after school and brought it all to life. I thought it was wonderful--little bustling students all around and Gansevoort Melville right in front of me. I went back decade after decade, including the Clarel centennial in 1976 when I almost gave one man in the audience apoplexy from fury (although Helen Vendler, I was told, whispered that I was right). After discovering that the Harpers had not published Melville's The Isle of the Cross in 1853, I hurried up to look at all the fragmentary local newspapers in the hope I would find it serialized in the Berkshires! When my earning power was highest, in the 90s, I contributed to strengthen the local collection. I knew and revered all the librarians from Mrs. Zack through Ruth Degenhardt up to Kathleen Reilly. I offered all my Collection to the Athenaeum a decade ago, but the then-director felt there was no way of making room for it. We were dashed, for that was the right home for it.
I thought I had arranged for the collection to live near the Gulf of Mexico, where I had been the night telegrapher (8 pm till 4 am) on the Kansas City Southern at Port Arthur 1957-1959 while attending school in Beaumont. That fell through recently.
The director of a very likely library did not even acknowledge my offer for a month while I hovered over the email sites like Agatha Hatch watching her little mail box decay, day by day, year by year. Northwestern promptly and kindly offered to take the letters (some of them, notably Jay Leyda's, highly desirable) but could not take any books or chronological folders of documents from birth till death and a little beyond. The books, I have to admit, are not all mint examples. Some of them, extremely hard to obtain decades ago, are a little grubby. But oh, how happy I was to assemble a mismatched run of Modern British Essayists, the importance of which no one had recognized! A few of them were very expensive--a copy of Spenser like the one which Melville marked, the one which had been his father's, or one of Cousin Kate's memorial volumes for her brother Henry. Most of them were just working copies of books as they came out, or while they were still sitting around in bookstores. The thing is, there are hundreds of them, many not in Google Books, and many you can't "Look Inside" on Amazon. And offprints! There are hundreds of offprints mostly signed by names people remember. And there are letters from Willard Thorp, Leon Howard--everyone in the next generations up through Sealts and Hayford!
The news from the present Director of the Berkshire Athenaeum, Alex Reczkowski, and Kathleen Reilly is that the Trustees voted yesterday to accept the collection. Kathy attended the meeting after knee surgery and explained my importance "to the research and preservation of the story of Melville's life," then hurried home for ice packs. Reczkowski very kindly calls this "a huge win for the Berkshire Athenaeum." Here in Morro Bay there are two very pleased people. This is what we both wanted, before we thought we would never have it.
I thought I had arranged for the collection to live near the Gulf of Mexico, where I had been the night telegrapher (8 pm till 4 am) on the Kansas City Southern at Port Arthur 1957-1959 while attending school in Beaumont. That fell through recently.
The director of a very likely library did not even acknowledge my offer for a month while I hovered over the email sites like Agatha Hatch watching her little mail box decay, day by day, year by year. Northwestern promptly and kindly offered to take the letters (some of them, notably Jay Leyda's, highly desirable) but could not take any books or chronological folders of documents from birth till death and a little beyond. The books, I have to admit, are not all mint examples. Some of them, extremely hard to obtain decades ago, are a little grubby. But oh, how happy I was to assemble a mismatched run of Modern British Essayists, the importance of which no one had recognized! A few of them were very expensive--a copy of Spenser like the one which Melville marked, the one which had been his father's, or one of Cousin Kate's memorial volumes for her brother Henry. Most of them were just working copies of books as they came out, or while they were still sitting around in bookstores. The thing is, there are hundreds of them, many not in Google Books, and many you can't "Look Inside" on Amazon. And offprints! There are hundreds of offprints mostly signed by names people remember. And there are letters from Willard Thorp, Leon Howard--everyone in the next generations up through Sealts and Hayford!
The news from the present Director of the Berkshire Athenaeum, Alex Reczkowski, and Kathleen Reilly is that the Trustees voted yesterday to accept the collection. Kathy attended the meeting after knee surgery and explained my importance "to the research and preservation of the story of Melville's life," then hurried home for ice packs. Reczkowski very kindly calls this "a huge win for the Berkshire Athenaeum." Here in Morro Bay there are two very pleased people. This is what we both wanted, before we thought we would never have it.
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