?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 12,000 - $ 18,000
MELVILLE, HERMAN. Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. 12mo, original green cloth, blind-stamped with heavy rule frame and publisher's circular device at center of each cover, rebacked with the original cloth laid-down, scattered stains, spine gilt dulled; orange endpapers discolored as usual, small diminishing iron gall ink stain to fore-edge, starting from preliminaries through page xxiii with burn-through to front flyleaf and title-page at upper outer margin, additional minor evidence to a few later leaves, light to moderate foxing, Roger H. West bookplate to front pastedown, few ink markings to endleaves and rear pastedown, Mount Pleasant Academy Library stamp to blank margins of three early pages; also noted on pp. 47 and 263; housed in custom cloth drop-back case. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851
first american edition, first state binding, containing thirty-five passages and the Epilogue omitted from the English edition (published a month earlier). Melville himself famously described his book thus: "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it." "[Melville's] great book, Moby Dick, was a complete practical failure, misunderstood by the critics and ignored by the public; and in 1853 the Harpers' fire destroyed the plates of all of his books and most of the copies remaining in stock (only about sixty copies survived the fire) ... Melville's permanent fame must always rest on the great prose epic of Moby Dick, a book that has no equal in American literature for variety and splendor of style and for depth of feeling" (Dictionary of American Biography XII, pp. 522-526). BAL 13664; Sadleir, Excursions 229; Grolier, American 60; Johnson, High Spots 57.
