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

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Moby Dick or The Whale. First Rockwell Kent trade edition, first printing, attractively bound. Kent's imagining of Melville's classic novel (1851) first appeared earlier in 1930 as a three-volume limited edition published by the Lakeside Press of Chicago. His efforts have been hailed as a masterpiece of 20th-century book illustration and credited with reviving public interest in a sublime but difficult novel.Kent (1882-1971) 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 19th-century textual and visual sources that had influenced Melville" (Abrams, p. 377).

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