Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

Front Cover
University of California Press, 1981 M11 10 - 576 pages
This trade edition of Moby-Dick is a reduced version of the Arion Press Moby-Dick, which was published in 1979 in a limited edition of 250 copies and has been hailed as a modern masterpiece of bookmaking. It was hand set under the supervision of one of America's finest book designers and printers. The initial letters that begin each chapter were designed especially for this book and christened "Leviathan." The illustrations, of places, creatures, objects or tools, and processes connected with nineteenth-century whaling, are original boxwood engravings by Massachusetts artist Barry Moser. The text of Moby-Dick used in this edition is based on that used in the critical edition of Melville's works published by the Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library.

This reduced version is smaller in size than the Arion edition and the California deluxe edition, but it includes all of the original pages and illustrations. It is printed in black only throughout, and it is not slipcased.

From inside the book

Contents

Loomings 2 The Carpet
2
The SpouterInn
3
PAGE viii
7
Breakfast
31
The Street
33
The Chapel 8 The Pulpit wwww3 33
36
The Sermon
42
ΙΟ A Bosom Friend
51
The Pequod meets the Albatross
240
The Gam
243
The Town Hos Story
247
Monstrous Pictures of Whales
268
Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales
273
Of Whales in Paint in Teeth c
276
Brit
279
Squid
281

Nightgown
55
Biographical
57
Wheelbarrow 14 Nantucket 55 57
59
Cutting
67
The Ship
69
The Ramadan
86
His Mark
91
The Prophet
95
All Astir
99
Going Aboard
102
Merry Christmas
105
The Lee Shore
110
The Advocate 91 95 99 102 105 ΙΙΟ III
111
Postscript
115
Knights and Squires 27 Knights and Squires
116
Ahab
124
Enter Ahab to him Stubb
127
The Pipe
130
Queen
131
Cetology
133
Does the Whale Diminish?
136
The Specksynder
148
The Cabin Table
151
The MastHead
156
The QuarterDeck Ahab and all
163
Sunset
171
Dusk
172
First NightWatch
173
ForecastleMidnight
174
Moby Dick
180
The Whiteness of the Whale
189
Hark
198
The Chart
199
The Affidavit
205
Surmises
214
The MatMaker
217
The First Lowering
220
The Hyena
231
Ahabs Boat and CrewFedallah
233
The SpiritSpout
236
The Line
284
Stubb kills a Whale
288
The Dart
294
The Crotch
296
Stubbs Supper
298
The Whale as a Dish
306
The Shark Massacre
309
68
314
71
321
72
328
74
338
The Battering
346
79
355
82
371
The Fountain
379
Schools Schoolmasters
402
Heads or Tails
409
Ambergris
418
94
425
The TryWorks
431
99
440
Ahabs
472
The Deck Ahab and the Carpenter
478
49
490
The Gilder
497
115
499
116
502
The Whale Watch
503
119
507
120
514
124
520
The LifeBuoy
526
127
530
The Pequod meets the Rachel
532
131
537
The Pequod meets the Delight
541
133
547
134
556
The Chase Third
564
Copyright

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About the author (1981)

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was born into a seemingly secure, prosperous world, a descendant of prominent Dutch and English families long established in New York State. That security vanished when first, the family business failed, and then, two years later, in young Melville's thirteenth year, his father died. Without enough money to gain the formal education that professions required, Melville was thrown on his own resources and in 1841 sailed off on a whaling ship bound for the South Seas. His experiences at sea during the next four years were to form in part the basis of his best fiction. Melville's first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were partly romance and partly autobiographical travel books set in the South Seas. Both were popular successes, particularly Typee, which included a stay among cannibals and a romance with a South Sea maiden. During the next several years, Melville published three more romances that drew upon his experiences at sea: Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both fairly realistic accounts of the sailor's life and depicting the loss of innocence of central characters; and Mardi (1849), which, like the other two books, began as a romance of adventure but turned into an allegorical critique of contemporary American civilization. Moby Dick (1851) also began as an adventure story, based on Melville's experiences aboard the whaling ship. However, in the writing of it inspired in part by conversations with his friend and neighbor Hawthorne and partly by his own irrepressible imagination and reading of Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists Melville turned the book into something so strange that, when it appeared in print, many of his readers and critics were dumbfounded, even outraged. By the mid-1850s, Melville's literary reputation was all but destroyed, and he was obliged to live the rest of his life taking whatever jobs he could find and borrowing money from relatives, who fortunately were always in a position to help him. He continued to write, however, and published some marvelous short fiction pieces Benito Cereno" (1855) and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) are the best. He also published several volumes of poetry, the most important of which was Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), poems of occasionally great power that were written in response to the moral challenge of the Civil War. His posthumously published work, Billy Budd (1924), on which he worked up until the time of his death, became Melville's last significant literary work, a brilliant short novel that movingly describes a young sailor's imprisonment and death. Melville's reputation, however, rests most solidly on his great epic romance, Moby Dick. It is a difficult as well as a brilliant book, and many critics have offered interpretations of its complicated ambiguous symbolism. Darrel Abel briefly summed up Moby Dick as "the story of an attempt to search the unsearchable ways of God," although the book has historical, political, and moral implications as well. Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, at age 72. The doctor listed "cardiac dilation" on the death certificate. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York, along with his wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville.

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