Ruth Melville has spent 40 years helping bringing books to life

By Lloyd Garrison

Last year, when Ruth Melville began showing up at Norfolk Now story conferences and volunteered to write for the paper, the editors were unaware of a true pro in their midst.

Not only could she write, but she was a seasoned editor at many venerable academic presses. Before retiring in 2001 as managing editor at Ohio State University Press, she was responsible for overseeing the editing and production of 35 books a year.

Many of her texts were mostly of interest to scholars. But others had broad readerships, and some she found moving. One was Christopher Browning’s†”The Origins of the Final Solution.”

“I was given very little time on it,” she recalls, “so I didn’t get to edit as carefully as I would have liked, but I knew it would get a lot of attention when†it came out—and it did. His ideas about how the Holocaust came about have stuck with me.”

She described as “horrifying” a collection of statements on torture by witnesses gathered by Amnesty International. “I could only work on it for short periods of time before taking breaks,” she says, “and the subject matter made worrying about punctuation and spelling seem somewhat beside the point.”

Fairly early in her career she edited translations of writers from eastern Europe, mostly Poland, including the three volumes of Witold Gombrowicz’s diaries. “It was a great crash course in the history and literature of those countries behind the Iron Curtain, and I’ve continued to be very interested in that area.”

One thing stands out about Melville’s career. She always wanted to be around books and writers, starting with a childhood wish to become a librarian. She was editor of the features page of her high school newspaper in Ardmore, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia. She took her BA at the University of Chicago, where she studied Latin, Greek and Sanskrit in the relaxed atmosphere that permeated faculty-student relationships, and in 1974, she received a Master’s degree at Yale in classical languages and literatures.

She received her first introduction to Norfolk in the 1970s after marrying Stephen Melville, an art historian whose family had long owned property on a hilltop overlooking Westside Road.

The two retired permanently to Norfolk just under three years ago and now live in the house in her in-laws built. Although Ruth Melville continues to edit academic titles, she found she wanted to put down her own roots here.

Which led her to her first story conference at Norfolk Now. “I knew that in writing for the paper I would meet people I wouldn’t ordinarily meet and learn how the town works,” she said. After she completed a trial run as issue editor without a hitch last month, the other editors voted unanimously to invite her to join them. She will edit and produce another issue before the end of the year.

Photo by Bruce Frisch.