Moby Dick (Illustrated)

"You should read it if you haven’t already. It’s amazing. It’s much funnier than it usually gets credit for. It’s a fantastic epic on the seas. It’s full of whales—so many whales! It’s a meditation on what it means to be alive and what it means to tell a story. Melville goes wild. We start on shore, but we spend the entire rest of the book unmoored, with our only community being this very strange group of sailors, some of whom are extraordinarily gloomy or quirky or have experienced tragedy. He’s got this quote I really love: “It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians.” I think he was really interested in how we share space with each other. Maybe that’s an overly chipper take on Moby Dick , but it’s a delight and has been overly drummed up as an unreadable book. It’s excellent. The Melville revival took place exactly when this illustrated edition by Rockwell Kent came out. This edition played a big part in popularizing the book. It has been said that Melville died in obscurity. That’s arguable. People knew who he was, and they were reading the book, but it definitely wasn’t thought of as one of the classic must-read novels of all time. Over the course of the 1920s, a couple of great Melville biographies came out. DH Lawrence was furious that America had forgotten about Melville, and he wrote about that. A number of people were saying, ‘This guy’s extraordinary.’ In many ways, Melville spoke to the Modernist movement because his writing is so quirky and strange, and interested in what’s true and what’s not true. It asks, ‘What is reality? How can we stretch language to approximate our lived experience?’ At this moment in the 20th century, a lot of people fell in love with his work, including this artist, Rockwell Kent, and it all came together to spark this revival. When Kent was commissioned to do this, he was one of the most famous artists in America. He’s not as famous now, but he and Norman Rockwell have similar names, and they used to receive each other’s fan mail. This book came out as a part of a series that wasn’t expected to make money; it was just supposed to show off incredible American artists and American printmaking. The publisher gave Kent carte blanche with the text and type and imagery. It came out as this crazy, really heavy, three-volume set, packaged in a huge aluminum box. They made only a thousand copies of it, for serious collectors. These days you can mostly find it in library collections. Then, Kent negotiated to do a popular edition. It was affordable, and it was a big hit. When it came out, a writer for The New Yorker noticed that the editors had been so excited that Rockwell Kent was participating in the project that they put only Rockwell Kent’s name on the cover and spine of the book. They forgot entirely about Melville. Kent was an amazing artist. It took him three years to do this project, even though it was supposed to take one year. It grew by several volumes as he was working on it. He did 250 illustrations, and they’re all glorious. He got a bad case of artist’s block, despite the fact that at the same time, he was doing a million other projects. His editor wrote him all these letters begging to just know when the project might finally be finished. A couple of years passed like that, with Kent ignoring letter after letter. Then Kent went to a really good party, where he met a couple of men who were planning to take a boat from New England to Greenland. Kent signed on as the navigator, even though he couldn’t navigate. He was really bad at it. By the time he was done with that journey, the boat had sunk off the coast of Greenland. They had to be rescued. He walked across Greenland, painting. Then he showed up in Denmark and finished the Moby Dick illustrations. Melville really did go on a whaling ship, and Kent went on this boat, and I think that they both knew the only way to tell this story is to be on the water. I feel like the pictures are full of salt air and those adventures."