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Harrison Hayford (1916-2001) His Students Recollect /When the pre-eniinent Melville schoiur Harrison Hayford died a little over ayear ugo, Leviathan asked Hershel Parker to compose an obituaiy. Rather than subnzit u conventionul piece, he ussenzbled comments from Hurry’s students, which not only reflect the varied personalities and experiences of some of the many people he touched but also serves as a verbul monument to this rich mind and great heart. Also included are commenls excerpted (with permission) Jmn G. Thomus Tunselle’sobituary in The Book Collector (London). - The Editol:] G. THOMAS TANSELLE Harrison Hayford, who died on 10 December 2001, will be missed by an extraordinary number of friends and acquaintances, on both sides of the Atlantic, in the overlapping worlds of literary scholarship and of book collecting and bookselling. To students and other readers of American literature, his name is known as an authority on Herman Melville; indeed, he was for decades the central figure in the field, responsible -directly or indirectly - for the most basic bibliographical and textual work on an author whose life and writings he had absorbed with remarkable thoroughness. And to book dealers of all kinds, whether they possessed high-level antiquarian stocks or disorderly assemblages of routine used books, lie was known as a particularly voracious collector and a part-time dealer, one whose regular visits to their premises consisted of equal parts of intense browsing in all sections of the shop and of engaging conversation on all manner of subjects. His collecting began as an adjunct to his scholarship. When I first met him, in September 1955,he had already put together a fine collection of scholarly books about American literature, as well as a selection of first and early printings of books by major American writers. Graduate students at Northwestern University learned something about the way scholars work just by sitting in his office, gazing at all those books, and then, after being invited to his house (as they always were), seeing how many more he lived among. I remember one occasion, during my first year as a graduate student, when he recommended a book to me (Frederick Hoffman’sThe Twenties, I believe); then he said it was a book he ought to own and that he would buy it the next day and lend it to me. That episode affected me deeply and, I think, played a role in my becoming a collector. And I was not the only one of his students to be H A R R I S O N H A Y F O R D influenced by his bookish activities: James Cummins, for example, became a prominent dealer in New York; and Joel Myerson formed an imaginative collection of nineteenth-century American literature, part of which was recently displayed at the University of South Carolina Library (in the exhibition catalogue he says that he often went book-hunting with Harry and left graduate school owing him $500 for books). When in 1965 Harry Hayford organized the Northwestern-Newberry project for editing all of Melville’swork, his own Melville collection became the nucleus around which the great Melville collection at the Newberry Library grew. Although he continued to pick up Melville books, most of them were for the Newberry, and he had to have something else to buy for himself, since (as I well know from extensive browsing with him) he was not content if he did not carry home books by the bagful. So it was then that he began collecting American poetry comprehensively, and later he added to his subjects American fiction, American humor (including cartoon books), and books by American women and blacks. These collections filled the basement, the third floor, and part of the second floor of the Hayford house on Elmwood Avenue in Evanston, Illinois, as well as a former garage at the back of the property. And, for the ground floor, he bought art books for his wife, Josephine, who taught art history at Kendall College in Evanston. (She died in 1996, after fiftyeight years of marriage during which four children were raised, and he was never the same again.) Periodically he culled from this stock (and he...

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