A sailor with no money and nothing keeping him ashore signs onto a Nantucket whaler and finds out at sea that the captain did not come for oil. Ahab lost a leg to a white sperm whale and has spent every day since deciding what that meant. He nails a gold doubloon to the mast, puts the question to thirty men who signed for wages, and they say yes, because a man who is certain is very hard to stand against.
Most of the book is not the chase. It is the ship: how a harpoon is forged, how a whale is cut in and boiled down, what the line does to the boat it is coiled in and to the men sitting inside the coil. Melville had done the work. He shipped on the Acushnet in 1841 and jumped her in the Marquesas, and the reason the whaling chapters read the way they do is that they are written by somebody who stood in the blood on the deck and not by somebody who read about it.
Then he keeps turning the subject over until it will not stay a subject. The whiteness of the whale, which is a chapter about why the absence of colour frightens people more than any colour does. The doubloon, where every man on board walks past the same coin and reads his own life in it. Ishmael telling you plainly that he cannot get to the bottom of the animal and going down another fathom anyway.
It sold badly, went out of print, and buried Melville's career. He died a customs inspector. The book was pulled back out seventy years later and has been the argument about American writing ever since. What makes it last is not the monster. It is Ahab's insistence that the harm done to him must have been meant, that something is behind the mask reasoning at him, and his willingness to take a crew down with him rather than accept that it was not personal.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition of the 1851 text, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 642 pages. All 135 chapters and the Epilogue, each chapter opening its own page, with Melville's own Etymology and his Extracts kept as front matter, 68 prose extracts and 18 verse passages, because those pages are his and not an editor writing about him. His dedication to Hawthorne is where he put it. Dropped: the public domain apparatus and the modern introductions that tell you what the whale means before you have met it.
Paperback: perfect bound on cream stock. A workhorse copy, meant to be carried, dog-eared, and marked up.
Hardcover: casewrap edition built for the shelf and the long haul.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
