Herman Melville – Timoleon & Other Ventures in Minor Verse

First Edition, limited to 250 Hand-numbered Copies.
 
Timoleon & Other Ventures in Minor Verse is a collection of poems by Herman Melville, privately published by the Caxton Press in 1891 in an edition of only twenty-five copies. They were composed immediately after Melville's travels in Europe and the Middle East (1856), and in part thirty years later when he resigned his post as a customs inspector (1885). 
These poems belong to that period of Melville's life when he had attained technical maturity as a poet. The title is taken from Plutarch's Life of Timoleon, and the work is clearly indebted to Shakespeare for the figure of Brutus; the collection as a whole dwells on solitude, and is infused with a profound sense of pessimism.