Friday, December 30, 2011

New Jersey Herald - Some ‘Moby Dick' pieces are pursued by collectors


New Jersey Herald - Some ‘Moby Dick' pieces are pursued by collectors:
"Kent's three-volume set of "Moby Dick" was published in 1930. It was filled with Kent's haunting and dramatic black-and-white drawings and the edition sold out almost immediately. Random House issued a trade edition, also immensely popular. "Moby Dick" reportedly was a rather obscure book until the 1920s, but the new edition with Kent's illustrations helped to bring the work to the attention of the American reading public."


Utterly fascinating that there are collectors of this. What is most fascinating is the understanding that the novel was "obscure," mostly until this book with illustrations that probably made it friendlier to read.

These drawings really do help the reader to see the adventure of the book. These are reminiscent of the great drawings in early additions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (See some of those here: http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Twa2Huc.html).

You wonder if Kent had decided to illustrate Henry Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast" like the article says if we would be talking more about Dana than Melville today.

'via Blog this'

Tattoos of a hard-core fan









in Science Tattoo Emporium at Discover Magazine has a blog entitled The Loom, apparently from the chapter of that name in Moby Dick. In researching tattoos, he remembered the tattooed Queequeg.

"I’m a hard-coreMoby Dick fan (this blog’s name comes from there), so it was a delight to stumble across a passage on tattoos, which I had forgotten."

Just fascinating how he calls HIMSELF a hard-core fan. Of all the things in the world to be a "hard-core" fan of, I am curious as to why Moby Dick. See, this is what I need to find more about, these individuals that consider this book just that darn good.