Beyond the Book
Beyond the Book
Louis O. Coxe and Robert Chapman with a foreword by Brooks Atkinson.
Billy Budd: A Play in Three Acts, Adapted from a novel by Herman Melville.
Princeton University Press, 1951.
Together with “The Playbill for the Biltmore Theatre” production, which opened in New York City on February 10, 1951. Originally titled Uniform of Flesh, the play premiered Off-Broadway in 1949 and was restructured for Broadway where it was a critical success, winning the Donaldson Award for Best First Play and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play.
E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier.
Libretto for Billy Budd, Opera in Four Acts, Music by Benjamin Britten.
London: Boosey & Hawkes, Ltd., 1951.
Together with the DVD of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, May 2010 production, and the “BAMbill” for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, February 2014 production — each featuring the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, London Philharmonic Orchestra, The Glyndebourne Chorus, conducted by Sir Mark Elder, and directed by Michael Grandage.
Gazette of The Grolier Club. New Series.
Editor Robert D. Graff.
Number 11, October 1969.
Includes “Herman Melville—An Exhibition Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of His Birth.” Comments and Selections by Douglas C. Ewing; and “An address by Norman Holmes Pearson in Honor of Melville.” The note asserts “never before has there been a major exhibition of his works, nor did a reasonably complete bibliography exist.”
United States Postage Stamp Portrait of Herman Melville.
Envelope signed by artist Anton Meyer.
First Day of Issue: New Bedford, MA, Aug. 1, 1984.
One of the USPS Literary Arts Series with the envelope including a “Scene from Billy Budd.” Stamp designer Bradbury Thompson based the portrait on the painting by J. O. Eaton from the Harvard University Library Collection.
A Herman Melville Collection exhibited at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death—from the collection of William S. Reese.
New Haven, 1991.
The exhibition included the 1924 Constable edition Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces and, in seeming defiance of decades of textual scholarship, the catalogue entry noted: “Melville had completed [Billy Budd] just weeks before his death.”
Dust jacket illustrated by Maurice Sendak for Hershel Parker’s Herman Melville: A Biography Vol. 2, 1851-1891.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Maurice Sendak was a devoted reader of Melville. The pen-and-ink drawing with watercolor wash, for the dust jacket designed by Glen Burns, shows an older and somber Melville, entwined by ivy. Sendak noted the work was inspired partly by the vines growing outside his studio window. Perhaps they echo the last line of Melville’s poem “Billy in the Darbies,” which closes the novella Billy Budd:
“I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.”
Carl Van Vechten.
Original Photograph of “Charles Nolte as Billy Budd.”
New York: Unpublished, 1951.
Gelatin silver print. Van Vechten’s blind stamp in lower right corner; on verso is his name and address stamp and handwritten date (April 18, 1951) and title (Charles Nolte as Billy Budd).
After a career as a writer, Van Vechten (1880-1964), at age 50, began photographing New Yorkers and others in the arts. Charles Nolte (1923-2010) was highly acclaimed for his title role in the 1951 Broadway production of Billy Budd.
Allied Artists.
Studio Publicity Poster and Seven Smaller Posters for Movie Billy Budd.
Peter Ustinov and Dewitt Bodeen, screenwriters, and starring Robert Ryan, Ustinov, Melvyn Douglas, and Terence Stamp.
Allied-Anglo Pictures Ltd., 1962.
Together with DVD released by Warner Brothers Pictures in 2014. The screenplay was based on the Coxe and Chapman 1951 adaptation of Melville’s novella.
Herman Melville.
Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories (Penguin Classics Edition).
London: Penguin Press, 2016.
Cover illustration by Duke Riley. Riley’s original drawing shown with printed volume.
The 2016 Penguin Classics edition features the reading text of Billy Budd, Sailor from the genetic study of the manuscript by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. and an introduction by Peter M. Coviello. The original cover art by Brooklyn environmental artist Duke Riley seems to have been inspired by the pose of the young sailor in the engraving (owned by Melville) of the 1948 edition. A more significant and fitting influence, however, is the sailor’s traditional art of scrimshaw. Duke Riley is known for reviving scrimshaw techniques, which he uses on found plastic objects, recycling waste from the sea into intricate and beautiful artworks. Riley’s melancholy Billy is already bound, hands cuffed in darbies, framed by the fateful rope and noose. The study drawing is ink on canary paper. The artist’s decision to replace the ship’s rat (an allusion to Claggart?) with a dove of peace and a starry heaven as backdrop is inspired—and brings to mind Billy’s final benediction “... delivered in the clear melody of a singing bird on the point of launching from the twig.”
Barry Moser.
Billy in the Darbies.
(2023)
On Canson Mi-Teintes archival paper.
Moser’s two drawings, in graphite pencil with chalk highlights, distill the poem to its tragic essence. The Canson Mill was founded in Annonay, France, in 1557 by the Montgolfier family, the developers of the first hot air balloon, which was made from their papers. Is this perhaps a prelude to Billy’s:
“Ay, Ay, all is up; and I must up too
Early in the morning, aloft from alow.”
Herman Melville.
Billy in the Darbies.
Tacámbaro, Michoacán, Mexico: Taller Martín Pescador, 2023.
Text set by Juan Pascoe in Monotype Bembo, and printed by him with an Imperial No. 1 Washington handpress using La Ceiba Gráfica lithographic ink; 22 copies printed on Velké Losiny handmade paper.
Barry Moser.
The Death of John Claggart, Master-at-Arms.
(2023)
Woodcut, 6 x 9 inches.
The image was cut into plank grain cherry, milled from heartwood especially for the Billy Budd project. The block was printed on Kitakata Green, a handmade washi paper primarily composed of Philippine gampi fiber manufactured by the Awagami Factory in Tokushima, Japan. It was printed by Bradley Hutchinson at his letterpress workshop in Austin, Texas.
Broadside for the Exhibition Melville’s Billy Budd at 100 at The Grolier Club of New York and Oberlin College Libraries.
Graphite pencil illustrations by Barry Moser flanking Melville’s poem “Billy in the Darbies.”
New York: The Grolier Club, 2024.
Printed by Bradley Hutchinson at his letterpress workshop in Austin, Texas in 150 copies, 50 of which have been signed by Barry Moser. The paper is Arches, from the mill founded in France in 1492.
