The Handsome Sailor

Herman Melville.
Billy Budd and Benito Cereno.
Introduction by Maxwell Geismar and paintings by Robert Shore.
New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1965.

This hybrid edition uses the 1948 Harvard corrected text with the 1962 Chicago title. The five illustrations, by the American painter Robert Shore, won the 1966 Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators. Seen here is “Billy Budd and the Dansker.”

Herman Melville.
Pierre, or, The Ambiguities; Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile; The Piazza Tales; The Confidence Man: His Masquerade; Uncollected Prose; Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative).
Edited by Harrison Hayford. New York: The Library of America, 1984.

This third Melville volume in The Library of America series included the last of the author’s fiction. Editor Hayford contributed new notes to the reprinting of the Chicago reading text. The distinctive jacket design by R.D. Scudellari, incorporating the photograph of Melville from the Houghton Library of Harvard, and the accompanying publisher’s note, invite us to meditate on “the conflicts central to all Melville’s work: between freedom and fate, innocence and civilized corruption.”

Bound to Vary: A catalog of the exhibition of unique fine bindings on the Married Mettle Press limited edition of Billy Budd, Sailor.
New York: Guild of Book Workers, 1988.

This exhibition catalog includes color plates of 17 unique fine bindings of the 1987 Married Mettle Press limited edition text and illustrations, each by a different binder. The edition was issued in 185 copies, of which 160 copies were bound with wooden boards and a bronze spine by Deborah and Benjamin Alterman at their Married Mettle Press. The foreword by J. Franklin Mowery, president of the Guild, precedes brief information from and about each of the binders.

Herman Melville.
Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative).
Illustrated by Deborah Alterman.
Mount Holly, New Jersey: Married Mettle Press, 1987.

Number XVII of 25 copies issued in sheets, in a hand binding by Mindell Dubansky: sewn on vellum tapes, bound in a limp paper wrapper made up of two laminated sheets—the lower with a Union Jack design painted on handmade paper, the upper spray-painted on Japanese tissue to appear like water; with bone clasps.

The limited edition of 185 copies was made by Benjamin and Deborah Alterman at their Married Mettle Press. It was letterpress printed on a Vandercook and a Washington handpress on dampened paper, handmade from rags. The artwork was printed directly from engraved endgrain woodblocks. In addition to the 25 copies in sheets, 160 copies were bound by the Altermans with a patinated bronze spine and wooden boards. Deborah engraved the woodblocks, and Benjamin did the typography; together they designed the book and the artwork, made the paper, marbled the endsheets, and printed and bound the 160 copies.

Hershel Parker.
Reading Billy Budd.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990.

Parker, a Melville biographer and one of the editors of the Northwestern-Newberry’s Writings of Herman Melville, characterizes the “late masterpiece” Billy Budd as a “wonderfully teachable story,” if not taught as finished and totally interpretable. Dedicated to Hayford and Sealts, Parker’s “reading” summarizes the 1962 Chicago genetic text in detail and reviews the critical approaches to Billy Budd before and after their landmark edition.

Herman Melville.
Tales, Poems and Other Writings.
Edited by John Bryant.
New York: Modern Library, 2001.

Bryant’s collection traces Melville’s growth from adolescence to his final years, from prose to poetry, and on to the “prose and poem concoction” of Billy Budd. The volume reprints the Chicago reading text but supplements it with Bryant’s “fluid-text” editing of manuscript leaves from the earliest stage of composition. Titled “Versions of Billy,” this section offers a “revision narrative” for what Bryant calls “The Ur-Billy Budd”: that is, early drafts of the monologue that would become “Billy in the Darbies” and of the prose headnote introducing it, which eventually would become the novella we know today.