RICHLY ILLUSTRATED WITH THE ICONIC ART WORKS OF WHALES AND WHALING FROM THE WORLD’S FOREMOST GALLERIES AND LIBRARIES. Few works of literature stand as tall as Melville’s grand opus about Captain Ahab’s obsession with Moby-Dick, an obsession so intense that it cruelly sealed the whaler’s fate. It is truly a grand novel: powerful, mythical, complex, and full of raw emotion. And yet, it is not a novel that can be read casually. Melville’s mind was a wild rambler, roaming through thematic brambleberries with gay abandon and with little regard for literary conventions. This presents the reader with a somewhat madly digressive journey that jumps frivolously through a semantic landscape shaped by leprechauns that delight in jumbling a circus of ideas, whale facts, whaling stories, and the inner workings of the whale hunters. Humans have had a complex relationship with whales over the ages: a juxtaposition of respect and rapacious hunting. Humans, as primary visual creatures, have captured this duality in numerous works of art. This has given us an expansive heritage of drawings, paintings and other artworks, a rich visual tapestry of all things whales and whaling scattered throughout the world’s museums and libraries – here it is brought together to accompany and comfort the reader as they join Melville in his ramblings. This truly unique edition of Moby-Dick is, arguably, the most richly illustrated version published to date. It brings together the canonical whale and whaling artworks from many of the globe’s major art galleries and libraries. It also contains a carefully curated collection of early depictions of whales, offering insights into how our views of the ocean giants have evolved. Whalers in the 19th century (the time Moby-Dick is set in) went to sea for long journeys, lasting years, all chronicled in detailed logs and journals. Some whalers took up pencils, ink, and watercolour to illustrate their journals; here we reproduce some of the most captivating illustrations that give us a rare insight into whale hunting in the time of Melville — they add a unique facet of realism from the actual actors of the day to the story. No library is complete without a copy of Moby-Dick. Why not make it a special addition by bringing in the wonderful arts of whales and whaling to create a fresh take on this old, grand lady of sea storytelling — I am sure Melville would approve of it.