From the Mast-Head

From the Mast-Head 2 010 is proving to be a year of transitions for a number of reasons. Most immediate is a shift in Leviathan’s editorial staff. As you will read in Wyn Kelley’s column, All Astir, Wyn will be stepping down as Associate Editor to pursue her scholarship more fully. In recognition of Wyn’s work as book review editor, assistant editor in charge of Extracts (starting in 1996), and associate editor of Leviathan (starting in 2003), the Melville Society joined in honoring her at the Society’s annual dinner held at the 2009 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. She was presented with a copy of the 1926 Nonesuch Edition of Benito Cereno, illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer, with Kauffer’s signature tipped into the volume. Each of this attractive special edition’s seven full-page illustrations is hand-colored through stencils. Wyn Kelley has brought a bright, thoughtful, expansive, and deep sensibility to the editing of the Melville Society’s primary publications—Extracts and Leviathan—which have made several transitions themselves over the past fifteen years. Her reputation as a prolific scholar and critic and her unstinting work in the Society’s outreach programs and in New Media Studies have brought great credit to our organization and journal. Plus, her uncanny eye for rooting out errors has, more than once, saved us from typographical embarrassment . I will miss working with her on Leviathan, even though I know that she will not be far away, as she will continue to work in the Melville Society on our Cultural Project and as Associate Editor of the Melville Electronic Library (MEL). Happily, the Melville Society is fortunate to have a plethora of talented members, any one of whom would be capable of taking over in Wyn Kelley’s place, and I am pleased to announce in these pages, as I did at our Seventh International Melville Conference in Jerusalem and at MLA 2009 in Philadelphia, that Sam Otter (chair of English at Berkeley) will join us in our October issue as the Melville Society’s new Associate Editor. I am also pleased to announce that Los Angeles educator and Melville scholar Robert Sandberg has joined the Leviathan editorial staff as our “webmaster” in charge of designing and maintaining our new Melville Society website, which you are invited to visit at http://melvillesociety.org/. You will see that Bob has done a wonderful job C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 3 J O H N B R Y A N T upgrading our site and giving it enhanced, interactive functionality. Please use the site for Melville information, Society news and photos, and updated information about Melville-related events. A further transition: Some are dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age, but not the Melville Society. On the heels of a modest 2008 NEH Digital Start-up Grant to develop “TextLab” (an electronic tool for editing Melville manuscripts), Hofstra University received a two-year $175,000 NEH Scholarly Editions grant for 2009–11 to continue development of TextLab and mount three texts—Moby-Dick, Battle-Pieces, and Billy Budd—on MEL, our open source “critical archive” for Melville. As part of the grant, twenty Melville scholars attended “MELCamp 2010,” which convened on the Hofstra campus on April 22–23, 2010, to discuss how we will shape the content in MEL and what innovative workspaces we would like to develop for generating new scholarship out of our proposed digital edition and archive. Watch these pages for continued updates on MEL, spread the word to your students and colleagues, and if you are interested in contributing to the project, send me a note. —The Editor John Bryant 4 L E V I A T H A N ...