March 24, 2006

Digital Resources for Scholars

To the Editor:

The readers of "Call Me Digital" (The Chronicle, February 17) may be interested to know about another project that, like Melville's Marginalia Online, aims to enhance Melville scholarship in the digital realm and in the absence of manuscript material.

One Melville scholar, the innovative poet and essayist Charles Olson, spent years in the 1930s pursuing the "lost five hundred," the approximate number of books sold by Melville's widow to a Brooklyn dealer in 1892.