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

£10,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Moby Dick or The Whale. First Rockwell Kent edition, limited to 1,000 sets, signed by the artist on the limitation page at the end of volume 3.In 1926, the publisher approached Rockwell Kent to illustrate Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Kent demurred, selecting instead Moby Dick (1851). He had complete creative control over his edition 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). The result has been hailed as among the great American illustrated books of the century, and it is also credited with reviving public interest in a sublime but difficult novel.

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