Book history follows the principle of an entropic universe: cohesion succumbs to eventual diffusion. The flow of historical materials between people, institutions, and spaces renders our records “atomized, pulled apart, stored in separate containers, making it much harder for us to inhabit coherent stories, to make sense of ourselves, our history, and the times we live in.”1 In the mid-twentieth century, the poet Charles Olson came to a similar conclusion during his scholarship on Herman Melville and in particular, Melville’s reading practices. Because of financial troubles, after his 1891 death Melville’s family sold his richly annotated library to dealers all over the East Coast. Beginning in 1933, Olson began to identify and gather these books from booksellers. In reconstituting this collection, he was one of the first scholars to encounter Melville’s reading notes—sometimes mere “x” marks in the margin, but as in the case of his copies of Shakespeare, sometimes revealingly annotated.2 During his graduate work at Harvard’s doctoral program in American Civilization from 1936 until 1939, Olson analyzed these annotations alongside Melville’s research on the New England whaling industry, and argued for their fundamental connection to Moby Dick (1851).3 Harvard scholar F.O. Matthiessen (who brought Olson to Harvard) praised Olson’s 1937 essay, “Lear and Moby-Dick” in his classic American Renaissance.4 Olson completed a book-length draft of his scholarship on Melville’s reading practices and library in 1940, placing this material aside as he joined the Office of War Information in 1942 as the Assistant Chief of the Foreign Language Division, a post he resigned in 1944 in protest of government censorship policies. Olson’s manuscript was later published as Call Me Ishmael in 1947,5 and he turned his comprehensive list of Melville’s books over to Merton Sealts, who completed Melville’s Reading (1948)6 by building The Postwar American Poet’s Library  An Archival Consideration with Charles Olson and the Maud/Olson Library

中文翻译：

---

战后美国诗人图书馆：查尔斯奥尔森和莫德/奥尔森图书馆的档案考虑

书籍历史遵循熵宇宙的原则：凝聚力屈服于最终的扩散。人、机构和空间之间的历史材料流动使我们的记录“被雾化、分离、存储在不同的容器中，使我们更难融入连贯的故事，理解我们自己、我们的历史和我们所处的时代。 1 在二十世纪中叶，诗人查尔斯奥尔森在研究赫尔曼梅尔维尔，特别是梅尔维尔的阅读实践时得出了类似的结论。由于经济困难，在他 1891 年去世后，梅尔维尔的家人将他带有丰富注释的图书馆卖给了东海岸各地的经销商。从 1933 年开始，奥尔森开始从书商那里识别和收集这些书籍。在重建这个集合时，他于 1944 年辞职，以抗议政府的审查政策。奥尔森的手稿后来于 1947 年以《呼唤我以实玛利》的形式出版，5 他将梅尔维尔的完整书籍清单交给默顿·西尔茨，后者通过建立战后美国诗人图书馆  与查尔斯·奥尔森和查尔斯·奥尔森的档案考虑完成了梅尔维尔的阅读 (1948)6莫德/奥尔森图书馆