Late-twentieth-century digital archives of canonical authors have pro-duced uncommonly expansive texts. Whereas once editors had to squeeze a book, with notes, glossaries, bibliographies, lists of variants, illustrations, critical introductions—a clanking hulk of editorial apparatus—between two cloth-covered boards, new media paradigms can create and sustain immense bodies of work. 1 With dazzling multimedia components, open-ended collaborations between readers connected by wikis and discussion forums, and armies of young scholars eager to play, the digital literary archive signifies multiplicity and proliferation. Yet as older media forms—print, film, video, sound recordings—evolve in new media landscapes, they have met (and collided) in what Henry Jenkins has identified as a “convergence culture,” where users may access many forms through one portal. This utopian notion of a single “Black Box” suggests that, like Hamlet, one can be bounded in a technological nutshell and count oneself a king of infinite digital space. Whatever the “Box”—a laptop, cell phone, or other personal device—one can use it to travel freely within a “participatory culture” where people and texts migrate, merge, and remix in endlessly proliferating combinations (Jenkins 1-24). And though in Convergence Culture Jenkins exposes the “Black Box” as an unachievable dream of the communications industry, this “Fallacy” has remarkable staying power, as entrepreneurs search for the one device that can do and contain all.

How very different from this Box of infinite space seems the tin bread box within which Elizabeth Shaw Melville stored her husband’s manuscript pages of Billy Budd and which Eleanor Melville Metcalf (1882-1964) shared with Melville’s first biographers and critics. We tend to think of Melville’s family as having preserved his writings within a metaphorically as well as literally constrictive box. Protective of his reputation, they controlled access