The bibliography of Herman Melville includes magazine articles, book reviews, other occasional writings, and 15 books. Of these, seven books were published between 1846 and 1853, seven more between 1853 and 1891, and one in 1924. Melville was 26 when his first, and had been dead for 33 years when his last, books were published. At the time of his death he was on the verge of completing the manuscript for his first novel in three decades, Billy Budd, and had accumulated several large folders of unpublished verse. The year 1853 saw a physical disaster which renders the books published by him in America prior to that date even more scarce today than would normally have been the case. At one o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, December 10, 1853, the establishment of Melville's publishers Harper Brothers was completely destroyed by fire, reportedly caused by a plumber throwing a lit candle into a bucket of camphene, which he mistook for water. The fire burned Harper's stock of Melville's unsold books which consisted of: Typee, 185; Omoo, 276; Mardi, 491; Redburn, 296; White Jacket, 292 ; Moby-Dick, 297; and Pierre, 494. Mardi and Pierre, Melville's two least popular books, had the largest number of unsold copies burned. Although Isle of the Cross is a possible lost work refused publication in 1853, the year was also the beginning of the long period of unpopularity precipitated by the appearance of Pierre and The Confidence Man (1857). Melville then turned his attention to poetry, to which he devoted more years than he had to travel adventure and fiction. A Melville revival that began in the 1920s led to the reprinting of many of his works, then out of print in the United States. Raymond Weaver, Melville's first biographer, edited a 16 volume edition for the London publisher Constable which included the first publication of Billy Budd. In 1926, Moby Dick was among the first titles in the newly founded Modern Library series. Beginning in 1948, independent publisher Walter Hendricks recruited scholars to edit annotated editions of Melville's works, beginning with a volume of his poetry. Produced under the general editorship of Howard P. Vincent, the series was originally projected to include 14 volumes but in the end no more than 7 appeared. In the 1960s, Northwestern University Press, in alliance with the Newberry Library and the Center for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language