MELVILLE, Herman.

£50,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. First US edition of Melville's greatest work, in the first issue binding (BAL's "A" state, with the publisher's device on the covers and orange endpapers). The US edition was the first to appear under the familiar title and contains 35 passages and the epilogue omitted from the slightly earlier British edition. Red cloth is the rarest of the first issue binding colours.Moby-Dick was originally issued in London earlier the same year, set from the New York sheets and titled The Whale. On publication, the novel was a "complete practical failure, misunderstood by the critics and ignored by the public; and in 1853 the Harpers' fire destroyed the plates of all [Melville's] books and most of the copies remaining in stock" (DAB, vol. 12, p. 523). Johnson notes that "tale of the sea" was "hailed from semi-obscurity... and acclaimed a masterpiece. The mystic quality of the pursuit differentiates this from the conventional adventure story" (Johnson, p. 57)."Moby-Dick is the great conundrum-book. Is it a profound allegory, with the white whale the embodiment of moral evil, or merely the finest story of the sea ever written?" (Grolier American, p. 94).Copies in first issue bindings appear in black, blue, grey, green, purple-brown, red, and slate-coloured cloth, without any priority. It was the custom of American publishers in the 1850s and 1860s to bind an edition in cloths of various colours, for the purpose of window display.

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