Though of a very ingenious mechanical turn, Nippers could never get this table to suit him. Here, for example, is a description of Nippers’s attempts to get his desk set to just the right incline: They are great side characters who provide a lot of comedy throughout. One is tense and touchy in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Turkey and Nippers are the two scriveners. With wit and verve, Melville describes each of these employees. Before Bartleby arrives (“who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of”), the staff consists of Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut. Back then, since all of the documents were written by hand, and there had to be several copies of each document, it is no surprise that his support staff consists of a few scriveners and one courier. Our narrator is a Wall Street attorney who lacks professional ambition: “I am a man who, from his youth upward, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.” He never argues in court and is very content that his job consists primarily in creating legal documents that help others transfer stocks and bonds. What got me to read it, finally? The desire to be in on the joke! “ I would prefer not to.” I wander around downtown Manhattan, from Wall Street to Trinity Church to City Hall, the book’s haunts, and, indeed, I dabble in the law of stocks and bonds as does the book’s narrator - and not many great works of literature go there. I know many tastes I admire love this book. After all, I’m a fan of American fiction. “I would prefer not to.” How long has that phrase haunted me because I didn’t know what it meant to literature! I confess: I had never read Melville’s short masterpiece, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street. Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Herman Melville (1853) Melville House (2004) 64 pp

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