First American Edition
"...for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard"
First American edition, first binding, of perhaps the greatest American novel of the 19th century. This American edition was the first to bear the title Moby Dick, as the earlier British issue of the text was titled The Whale. The American edition includes 35 passages and an epilogue that Richard Bentley, the British editor, omitted from the first London edition.
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? Whichever it is, now rediscovered, it stirs and stimulates each succeeding generation, whether reading it for pleasure or with a scalpel. Within its pages can be found the sounds and scents, the very flavor, of the maritime life of our whaling ancestors - Grolier American.
The present example is bound in the publisher's red cloth, which is rather rare in the market compared to the drabber blue examples. Harper & Brothers issued this first issue binding in a variety of cloth colors, without any priority: black, blue, green, brown, red, and perhaps other colors. At the time, it was the practice of American publishers to bind editions in various colors, perhaps to enliven window displays (cf. the Herman Melville chapter in Michael Sadleir, Excursions in Victorian Bibliography, page 221).