Finding a Fugitive Pym Reference

I was surprised. Looking at a photocopy in a plastic envelope in a loose-leaf binder on a table in the back of the booth of Willis Monie Books (Cooperstown, New York) at the 2023 Boston Antiquarian Book Fair in the Hynes Convention Center, I was surprised. The title page read Eighty-Nine Good Novels of the Sea, / the Ship, and the Sailor / A List Compiled by J. K. Lilly / An Account of Its Formation / By / David A. Randall. The book had been published by the Lilly Library of Indiana University in 1966. What was it? I'd never heard of it. I was surprised.I had a copy of the March 1960 issue of The Indiana University Bookman, with J. Albert Robbins's "Edgar Poe and His Friends: A Sampler of Letters Written to Sarah Helen Whitman" and David A. Randall's "The J. K. Lilly Collection of Edgar Allan Poe." (Randall was the librarian of the Lilly Library.) And I had an inscribed copy of Randall's 1964 volume The J. K. Lilly Collection of Edgar A. Poe. But I didn't know this Lilly/Randall item. Over all these years, I'd never come across it. I withdrew the photocopy from the plastic sleeve to learn more.Well, it turns out that J. K. Lilly had created a list of sea novels and sought the response of experts in the field. My hope was that Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket—which Lilly had given to the Lilly Library as part of his Poe collection—was on Lilly's list. The book did appear in Lilly's initial, Fall 1958, thirty-three item list and then, with responses from Randall, Jacob Blanck, Vincent Starrett, and others, on the subsequent hundred-item list. But Pym did not make the final list of eighty-nine items. Along with a number of other books on the initial lists, it had been deleted.What had happened? We learn from this book that Starrett had recommended that Lilly consult Professor Alexander Laing at the library at Dartmouth—"He's a good man on sea fiction"—and Laing had written, in November 1958,Well!I suppose he had in mind the works of such writers as J. N. Reynolds and Benjamin Morrell (whose ghostwriter for A Narrative of Four Voyages was Samuel Woodworth). Of course, Herman Melville, too, had his "fish documents." And Laing did not apparently recognize the artistry of Poe's novel. But no matter—the book has made its way, treated in scholarship and studied in college classrooms. Notably, in 2015 it was listed in The Guardian as one of the hundred best novels written in English.I bought that photocopy at the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair. A modest item—stapled and incomplete—it was nonetheless the vital path for me to the original publication. At home, I found the original volume listed online at Kubik Fine Books of Dayton, Ohio, and bought it too.The book arrived, a handsome slender quarto, in fine condition, without dust jacket or pagination, with thick paper and a tipped-in frontispiece of a painting of a ship by J. K. Lilly. It is one of five hundred copies. And it is a minor treasure for my collection, featuring as it does a fugitive Pym reference worth knowing. The reference adds to our understanding of Pym's reputation at the middle of the twentieth century.Today, I imagine, anyone making a list of eighty-nine good novels of the sea would probably include Pym, bones and all. And any scholar compiling a secondary Pym bibliography would want to include Eighty-Nine Good Novels of the Sea, the Ship, and the Sailor.Recalling my little bibliophilic adventure, I am reminded of how important my book collecting has been to my scholarship—one pleasure has informed the other.