Moby-Dick, the Penguin Classics paperback
Moby-Dick
or, The Whale
Herman Melville, 1851
- Edition
- Edition Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Penguin Classics)
- ISBN
- ISBN 9780142437247
- Form
- Form Novel
The book itself, by post, in our packaging.
Posting to
Postage £4.50, tracked, 2 to 4 working days.
Call me Ishmael.
In the parcel
The book, the Penguin Classics edition, in a rigid mailer.
An ex libris stamp pressed into the title page, the Daily Canon mark, with a line for your name.
A bookmark embossed with the mark, made for us by Mount Street Printers in London.
A postcard of the book’s own sky, the painted scene the app opens on.
Packed in London in one evening and posted tracked. UK postage is in the price; elsewhere by zone at checkout.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Moby-Dick
A book everyone is warned is difficult and dull, which is just about the least accurate warning in all of literature, because the thing itself is wild and funny and frightening by turns.
Almost everyone arrives at Moby-Dick already convinced that it is going to be a chore, a long, grey, worthy book about a man and a fish, padded out with endless chapters on rope and blubber that exist only to be skipped. The reputation gets the surface roughly right and the book itself completely wrong. What is actually between the covers is one of the strangest and most alive things ever written in English, a novel that swings without warning from low comedy to real terror to passages of prose so charged they read like scripture, and it was written by a man who plainly could not believe his luck at having found so enormous a subject to chase.
If you like this, try
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Conrad sends another obsessed man upriver instead of out to sea, and the whale becomes a man.
£1.99
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge's mariner shoots one great white bird and the sea punishes the whole ship, the same dread of a creature that carries more meaning than any sailor can bear.
£1.99
About the book
A man with one leg, who lost the other to a white whale, stands on the deck of a Nantucket whaler and nails a gold coin to the mast: it belongs to the first sailor who sights the beast that maimed him. From this Herman Melville builds something far larger than a sea chase. The Pequod carries men of every race and faith toward a creature that has stopped being an animal and become the face of everything indifferent and enormous that a person can hate: God, the ocean, the blank white nothing behind the world. The prose swells like Shakespeare let loose on the Atlantic, lurching from a chapter on the colour white into sermons, soliloquies, the dense beautiful tedium of how to butcher a whale. You feel the wave gathering long before it breaks. Few books reach so high and pull the whole sky down with them.