As a captain of the nation’s Herman Melville industry, Harrison Hayford has pretty well harnessed the great white whale, after four decades of intrepid scholarly effort. But he was recently overwhelmed by a colossal white elephant, in the form of 40,000 back issues of Poetry magazine.
A retired Northwestern University professor and a pre-eminent textual editor, whose Melville labors include two critical editions of “Moby-Dick,” Hayford had responded to a basement-sale circular from the Newberry Library, offering its stockpile of Poetry magazines.
The Newberry inherited the Poetry backlog eight years ago when the magazine’s editorial offices moved into the library, 60 W. Walton St. “We seemed to have lots of space then,” said Mary Wyly, the associate librarian.
With a $1.29 million grant for the expansion of its Lyceum adult education program, however, the Newberry needed the basement for classrooms, Wyly said, and the back issues of Poetry had to go. But supply overwhelmed demand and, at 50 cents an issue, there were relatively few buyers.
At that point Hayford entered the picture, intending to save those many thousand Poetry magazines from the jaws of the shredder. Though concerned about the wholesale destruction of Poetry’s archives, Hayford acknowledged that his motives weren’t entirely scholarly or preservationist.
For 30 years, he has operated a “crypto” book business from his Evanston home, Hayford said, specializing in out-of-print books and literary journals for university libraries, and he figured that the back issues might have more value for resale than for recycling.
But Hayford’s eyes were bigger than either his stamina or his storage facilities, as he quickly discovered when he showed up at the library a week ago with a rental truck. He finally had to settle for about a dozen cartons, about 2,000 issues of the magazine, which won’t put any strain on his shelves. The rest went to a recycling company.
If Hayford was disappointed but relieved, so was Joseph Parisi, editor of Poetry magazine, who described the loss as “wrenching,” even though the magazine keeps a small cache of back issues in its Newberry editorial offices. “We were very lucky to be able to keep them as long as we did.”
The 78-year-old Hayford only wishes he could have been a more herculean rescuer. “I felt a little sheepish, having said I would do it. But once I started digging in and discovered how many there were, I had to back away.”
Hayford faced an even more daunting task, perhaps, in editing the 15 volumes of Melville for the Modern Language Association, in its campaign for faithful editions of works by classic American writers. The leviathan among them was the 1,064-page, 3 1/2-pound, $90 edition of “Moby-Dick,” published in 1988, which included 400 “corrections, revisions or emendations” and 500 pages of scholarly appendages.
With the 14th volume (“Published Poems”) nearly completed, that leaves only one Melville book to be edited, “Billy Budd and Other Late Manuscripts,” made up of the famous novella and “all the unpublished stuff that was in his desk when he died,” Hayford said.
While his struggles with Melville were more successful, Hayford compared them with his attempt to haul away all the back issues of Poetry magazine. “I had no idea what I was getting into or how much time it would take,” he said. “But that’s life, isn’t it?”
