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  • From the Mast-Head
  • John Bryant

With this October 2013 issue of Leviathan, we complete our journal’s fifteenth volume and the first year of publication with Johns Hopkins University Press and Project Muse. This has been an important year in the growth of Leviathan, and it also marks my last year as Editor of the Melville Society. While the honor of continuing to work with such a prestigious academic press as JHUP is alluring, I am again announcing, after almost twenty-five years as editor of the Melville Society, that I will be stepping down at the end of the year. Twenty-five years is a long time, though not necessarily long in editor years, and some editors there are who have served longer.

In the Melville Society, the Editor is an elected official who serves a three-year term, with no limit on the number of terms one can serve. This is good policy. As I detailed in my last Mast-Head, editing is hard work linked to a relentless schedule. Burn-out can happen, and society members and publishers alike need assurances that a working editorial staff is on board so that submissions will be processed and issues will be delivered in a timely, indeed “periodical” manner. Equally important is for an editor to stay fresh in the job, not only up-to-date on current trends in criticism and the profession and of the day but also mindful of traditions and traditional approaches. The editor needs to be alive to the expansiveness of Melville and the kind of “growing” that both thrilled and exhausted Melville. An election every three years is a not-too-subtle reminder of one’s editorial obligation to make sure the train runs on time, to keep one’s fingers on the pulse of the reader, and to grow. As it happens, in my years as editor, I have been returned to office repeatedly in eight uncontested elections. I make no boast about this fact. I rather imagine that it has less to do with my abilities or intellect and more to do with the fact that the job involves much work and barely enough compensation to keep children in shoes so that few in our field are incentivized, as they say, to apply.

I suppose that my own persistence in editing has to do with a love of all things related to publication: writing, revision and line-editing, lending ear to others in helping them find a thread in their argument otherwise concealed, and then getting it all to press, grammatically, in a flurry of eleventh hour madness before deadline. I also like the community of thinking that emerges in the editorial process. Writers submit, and all comers are treated with respect; no submission I have received lacks the seed of an idea that an editor cannot find and encourage. Editing, I have always felt, is a seminar. And I feel privileged [End Page 1] to be able to sit in and learn new things from each new writer and thinker and to help them, when I can, bring their writing and thinking into closer, more effective harmony. Editing, I have come to see, is a kind of teaching, but only to the extent that teaching is a form of learning.

My successor in this three-year renewable job as Editor of the Melville Society is Samuel Otter, who has served as my Associate Editor for three years and has been a contributor, special guest editor, and valued reader for Leviathan over the past ten years. In his role as associate he has edited our Extracts department and managed book reviews, and he has increasingly participated in the day-to-day activities of running the journal. He has performed remarkably well in the sanity department, given that he was simultaneously serving a three-year term as chair of English at Berkeley. Sam’s patience, resilience, good cheer, broad understanding of human beings, deep intellectual affinities for new ideas and old, his inclusiveness yet critical sensibility, and his willingness to laugh at my jokes have made him the kind of person who will surely excel at this position.

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