Celebrate Herman Melville and his short story Bartleby the Scrivener by participating in the creation of the Call Me Melville edition of the book. The fun begins at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts, located at 28 Renne Avenue, on Friday, October 5, during October’s First Friday’s Artswalk from 5pm-7pm.
Bartleby the Scrivener is the brief tale of a gentleman who copies documents for a New York lawyer, long before the days of modern photocopiers or even Risographs. In his honor, substitute scriveners are being enlisted to help hand-write a new edition of the Melville tale.
Participants will take turns hand-copying a bit of Melville’s text onto fine paper. Those contributors who feel artistic are invited to draw illustrations to accompany the text. Once the text is completed and the pictures collected, they will be bound into a special commemorative Call Me Melville edition of the book. This one-of-a-kind tribute to Melville and to the community will be scanned into a digital format and shared with Melville scholars and the greater community.
To help celebrate this crowd-scribing event, The Friends of the Berkshire Athenaeum will provide free copies of Bartleby the Scrivener for the first 100 participants. Get out, enjoy the Artswalk and become part of literary history.
For those interested in writing full-length novel of their own, join the Berkshire Athenaeum in celebrating National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this November!
