KENT, Rockwell (illus.); MELVILLE, Herman.

£2,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Moby Dick or The Whale. First Rockwell Kent trade edition, in a handsome binding by the Chelsea Bindery. Kent's imagining of Melville's classic, first published earlier that year by the Lakeside Press of Chicago in a three-volume limited edition, has been hailed as a masterpiece of 20th-century book illustration and credited with reviving public interest in this sublime but difficult novel.Kent was given complete creative control over the illustrations and "spent five years researching and designing his project, during which time he discovered many of the [previously unknown] nineteenth-century textual and visual sources that had influenced Melville" (Abrams, p. 377).

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