Moby Dick
New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851. First Edition. Cloth. 1st American edition of Melville’s ungraspable phantasm of life. B. A. L.’s 1st binding (and most are) with Harper’s circular logo. Orange endpapers darkened (the standard color), foxing only to the preliminaries and ads, the text is clean. Near fine, a copy that will delight you like seeing old enemies who are down on their luck, and this book is no longer generally available in such condition, when most copies look like grandma’s knee. And here’s a warning. Buying a worn or (worse) restored Moby–Dick, while a copy like this one is for sale, is to jump overboard, into a vortex, tied to a bag of anchors. Near fine. Item #272
Moby–Dick is an American prose epic with the ultimate richness of substance, style, imagery, power, purpose, presentation, and vocabulary, all enforcing Melville’s deployment of fate’s deceptiveness, and sifted through the mellow narration of Ishmael, the comforting observer, articulate reporter, active participant, and lone survivor. It’s branded as Romanticism, and like other praxes gathered under that clustering, it is emotional, but it is awash in such realistic depictions of whaling, psychology, and human interaction, as to make one recoil with wincing at our routine preconceptions of any term derived from the source word roman (ce).
Price:
$125,000.00