PEMcast Episode 36: The Book Arts of Moby Dick

(PHONE RINGING)

Nathaniel Philbrick: Hello.

Dinah. Hi Nat. It’s Dinah from the Peabody Essex Museum.

Nat: Oh, Hi. It’s great to be back in touch with you after all these years.

Dinah Cardin: So, if you want to speak about the first time you read Moby Dick and why you found it so compelling.

Nat: Well, I was a senior in high school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, [laughs] the maritime capital of the universe. My father was an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh and with a specialty in maritime literature. His favorite book in the world was Moby Dick.

Dinah: This is Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Why Read Moby Dick. We’re talking because Philbrick’s book – all about the 19th century novel – is being sold in our shop here at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Along with beautiful copies of Moby Dick, of course. This is because, here at PEM, we’ve recently opened an exhibition called Draw Me Ishmael: The Book Arts of Moby Dick.

Nat: I hated it even though I had never read a word of it until my senior year when my English teacher said I had to read Moby Dick along with the rest of my classmates. This was the best friend I had not yet met. This was the novel I would end up reading over and over again. It was in high school when I came to the realization, the worst realization a teenager can have, your father was right.

(THEME SONG)

Dinah: Welcome to the PEMcast, conversations and stories for the culturally curious. I’m your host, Dinah Cardin. In this episode, we’ll take you on a journey, both on the sea, and through the minds of people whose lives have been profoundly touched by this one great book.

Nat: When I started reading Moby Dick, that first chapter, you know, it’s "Call me Ishmael." This for me was I was harpooned.

Dinah: During this time we have together, I hope to harpoon you, or at least, convince you that Moby Dick is the most important American novel, influenced by Shakespeare and the Bible. All of these different elements and ingredients go into this one masterwork. And, of course, there’s a Salem connection. The book is influenced by and dedicated to Salem’s own Nathanial Hawthorne. These days, you just might spot members of PEM’s staff with a copy tucked under one arm. And we’re having a Moby Dick read-a-thon online with PEM Reads, our book club, as participants take bite size chunks and meet every few weeks to finish the 135-chapter book in just under a year. On a chilly and rainy winter’s night, our marketing department copyeditor participated in an OVERNIGHT marathon reading of Moby Dick at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. New Bedford is where Melville set out on a whaling ship to do his research. Let’s listen in to Meg Boeni.

Meg Boeni: It’s a little after midnight and it’s raining lightly in New Bedford, Massachusetts. I’m about to enter hour 12 of the 2024 Moby Dick marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. We’ll see how it goes.

(Meg reading from a chapter and fades out)

Dan: Moby Dick includes just about everything you can imagine about the sea. It encompasses almost everything that was known by Americans in 1851. It's a story of struggle and a chase for a dream. It's an attempt to meet an unachievable goal.

Dinah: This is Dan Lipcan, the Anne C. Pingree Director of PEM’s Phillips Library, one of the oldest libraries in the U.S. He’s also the curator of this exhibition, which is drawn almost entirely from the Phillips Library collection. This collection includes vast quantities of manuscripts, books, photographs and maps. It also holds one of the world’s largest assemblages of ships’ logbooks. I asked Dan about the first time he read Moby Dick.

Dan: I first read it in college and I didn't think too much of it at the time. But then a family friend showed me a trade copy, the Arion Press edition from 1979 featuring the wood engravings of Barry Moser. I was hooked by the imagery that Moser had brought to that particular edition. I never saw the novel the same way since. There have been dozens and dozens of exhibitions of artwork inspired by and related to Moby Dick. Paintings, sculpture, prints, illustrations. There have been many exhibitions of the editions of Moby Dick that focus on the publishing history and the books themselves. But to my knowledge, never has there been one focused on how artists have interpreted and illustrated Moby Dick, in the original form of the novel, the novel as a book.

Dinah: Here at PEM, we are celebrating the novel, with its timeless themes that continue to inspire artists, designers and creatives of all types.

Dan: We have books that open, fold-out, and pop up or expand into a telescoping peep show view of a particular scene from the novel. There are decorated bindings. We're thinking about ways in which designers try to summarize the contents of Moby Dick through the exterior package that is the binding design. The exhibition makes a claim that Moby Dick continues to inspire book artists because it's such a rich and engaging text.

Dinah: But why is this story so rich and engaging?

Dan: Moby Dick is this rich tapestry of ideas and concepts about humanity's place in the world, about whaling, about natural history, about maritime life, about how we interact with each other, about how we can get along with others that are different from us. Moby Dick is full of humor, philosophy, poetry, and sound. The way Melville has written it is full of visual imagery, full of sassy asides, and humor. It's a story that contains multitudes that has something for everybody. Each generation has a different way of looking at the novel, pulling different aspects out to apply to whatever the contemporary society is at the moment or the contemporary ideas are at the moment.

Dinah: Ideas we wrestle with today: Race, class, queerness. The exhibition includes a four-volume miniature edition from Germany. The books are about two inches high. The Boston Globe said, “Forget about the whiteness of the whale. Here it’s the wee-ness that gets you.”

Dinah: What would you say to people who you're out in the world and they say, "What exhibition do you have going right now?" And you explain to them that it's a tiny show about a really big whale?

[laughter]

Dan: I think some of our marketing colleagues have been using "small but mighty." This is one room plus a little hallway off of it. We've packed in 51 books and works, 51 objects here. There's a lot of content and a lot to look at in a very small space, but I think the designers have arranged it beautifully. This is a big book about a big animal that deals with big ideas, and a lot of different ideas.

Dinah: Which one, if you had to pick one in this room, is your favorite?

Dan: Wow, that's really, really hard. I feel like a parent. I love all my children equally.

Dinah: Dan shows me the Barry Moser edition that first sparked his interest in Moby Dick. He says it’s an amazingly beautiful art object.

Dinah: This is not a beach read?

Dan: No, not something you stash in your beach bag and bring down to the water. Entirely, it was all custom done. All of the type was hand-set from using hot metal type, so all of these letters were put in place manually. The capital letter there, the blue C of Call Me Ishmael, that set of initial capital letters, one in each chapter was custom designed for this edition. The paper was commissioned from a mill in Kent, England. It has like kind of a bluish tint to it. There's actually a watermark of a whale in the paper. Every few pages, if you shine light behind the page, you'll see a whale watermark, which is very cool. It's bound in blue leather. It's just a masterwork of the book arts. Very difficult to find. One of the fun facts about this particular copy is that a bookseller in Boston helped us acquire it. We bought it at auction and then the auction house misplaced it for about a month after the sale. We had a little bit of our own white whale hunt happening [laughs] for this exhibition. We're very pleased to have acquired a copy, but there were some tense moments there in the acquisition process.

(MUSICAL INTERLUDE)

Dinah: You and I ran into each other at a book arts fair in Boston not long ago. How nerdy is this? I mean, somebody who's into the watermarks, the type, it's very normal to you, but we realize this isn't everyone.

Dan: That's right. It's not everybody that's into this thing. There are people who are into it more than I am, who can talk about specific typefaces and who know the difference between a G in one typeface and a G in another typeface and they can identify it by sight. There's some really amazing knowledge out there in the book world. But hopefully, everybody will be able to connect with something or other that they find here, whether it's an illustration, or a typeface, or a binding design.

Dinah: I love the way you can see the backs of the spines the way these are displayed?

Dan: In a way, it's like books that are on the shelf. We wanted to make sure that people could have a look at the spines and the covers and not just have this flat installation of them on the wall. These wooden shelves underneath them recall the ribs of a ship's hull.

Dinah: In the center of it all, there is a white leather cover that looks like it could be the wrinkled skin of a white whale. And it’s LOOKING at you.

Dan: We have our white leather artistic binding with the prosthetic eye done by Exeter bookbinders in England. It's watching over the whole gallery. It's a little bit creepy and a little bit sinister, but also very cool. It's on this 45-degree angle. It's as if you were standing in front of the whale as it is breaching in front of you.

Dinah: What is this abstract one over here, the pink?

Dan: This is an oversized edition with illustrations by LeRoy Neiman who you might be familiar with his super-saturated and colorful paintings of horse racing and sailboats. Jacques Cousteau wrote a preface and these full-page illustrations of Neiman's are really luridly colored. They're super vibrant, very abstract. For me, they bring whaling into that realm of masculine sports.

Dinah: The boat seems tilting. It's a little bit scarier than the blue, sunny day over there.

Dan: Right. There's this pink sky here. On other pages, there's a breaching whale with a yellow sky behind it. It just feels very uncomfortable and neon-like in a way, right?

Dinah: It should be noted that there are also two ship logbooks on view, one of which came from the whaleship Melville worked aboard for a year and a half.

Dan: He was on a merchant ship. He actually did a couple years' worth of whaling. His experiences at sea were formative, gave him lots of stories and anecdotes about life at sea and life on a whaleship.

Dinah: You can also see the book by Owen Chase about the whaleship Essex from Nantucket, which was stove by a whale and inspired Melville’s book.

Dan: The survivors of the Essex floated for 90 days in open whaleboats. Many of them died. A few of them survived. When Melville was at sea, he borrowed a copy of Chase's book, read it near the site of the wreck of the Essex, and it profoundly affected Melville. He was taken with a story in a popular periodical about the notoriously hard-to-capture albino whale who lived primarily off the coast of the island of Mocha near Chile.

Dinah: It’s time for a plot summary. To break it down, Ishmael, curious about the sea, goes to the Massachusetts coastal town of New Bedford, where he finds himself sharing a bed with a stranger. The two go to Nantucket and sign up to go out on the Pequod. The scary captain, Ahab, decides to go after a large white sperm whale for its highly sought whale oil. There are several gams, social time on the open sea, with other boats. There are several high speed chases of the whale, who eventually stoves and sinks the ship. Our hero, Ishmael, survives to tell the tale.

Nat: For me, the novel is a metaphysical survival manual. It comes down to the character of Ishmael.

Dinah: Nat Philbrick again.

Nat: He is the one crew member to survive the Pequod's disastrous encounter with the white whale, and I think there's a reason to it. His voice, for me, is the rock of Moby Dick. He's someone who's a wise ass, who is funny. He's deeply empathetic, brave and willing to end up in a bed with a cannibal, something that would be inconceivable to most white Americans in 1850 or when this was supposedly set, well, before that, and finds it to be a redemptive affirmation of universal humanity.

Dan: I think Moby Dick is one of the great American novels because it is about, to an extent, America's place in the world at the time of its writing in 1850 and 1851. It thinks about America and Americans in a global context. It's this epic story about the chase for an ideal to attain a goal that requires suffering, dedication, and sacrifice.

Dinah: As Nat Philbrick writes in his book Why Read Moby Dick, Ishmael questions, in a time of devout Christianity in America, whether there is even a heaven at all. He also paints a picture on the Pequod of the ultimate melting pot. People from all over the world, of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds, working together for a common cause. The pages of the book contain the genetic code of America, says Philbrick, and all its promises, problems, conflicts and ideals of 1850. Moby Dick becomes a book about America racing hellbent toward the Civil War.

Nat: Melville was so far ahead of his time. As he says, it was his experience whaling that provided him with the insight that no matter who you are, no matter what color, no matter what ethnicity, no matter where you're from, what age, whatever, you have a commonality to which that needs to be respected. That's not how most Americans thought of themselves and their country in relation to the world. It's absolutely antithetical to that. This was a time of manifest destiny. We were riding this wave of success and power. Many American men were drunk with that sense of superiority. Melville throughout Moby Dick and throughout much of his work is poking holes into that, mocking that.

Dinah: A lie festered at the ideological core of the then 30 states that made up America, writes Philbrick. Though they were promised liberty and freedom for all, the southern half of the country was dependent on African slavery.

Nat: There is Melville in many ways, prefiguring the voice of Walt Whitman in a few years' time with this all inclusive almost transcendental reaching out to humanity. Moby Dick just becomes more and more relevant. It's inclusive, and I think it's an inspiration to us today to know that all those years ago there was someone who had gone out and experienced the world and come to this understanding. That early scene with Ishmael and Queequeg sleeping together at an inn in New Bedford, which must have been pretty darn shocking when you encountered that in 1851.

Dinah: Yes, the infamous bedfellows.

Dan: Queequeg and Ishmael are in bed together. They're sharing a bed in a hotel room in New Bedford. There's a so-called marriage between them. Some scholars have said this is the first instance of same-sex marriage in literature.

Dinah: There are racy bits in the novel. Sperm whales. Sperm, get it?

Nat: He talks about sitting around a tub of spermaceti, squeezing the spermaceti and squeezing each other's hands.

Dan: “Ripening his apricot thigh," "Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter's," "I Celebrate a tail," "Chiefly known to me by Thy rod," "Sage ejaculation."

Dinah: This is Dan in the gallery reading a page of the artist’s book “More Choice Morsels from Moby Dick,” published by Billy O'Callaghan. These quotes are harvested snippets of the novel. Some of them show up as slogans on things like baseball caps, which are sold in our shop.

Dinah: You can run around all summer and go to P town or Nantucket, or wherever, and you're wearing this irreverent thing that makes people smile, but at the same time, it means you're a literary dude.

Dan: That's right. We're taking this serious literary work and imbuing it with this humor and this sass that is endearing and so funny. You might want to get your hat before we sell out because I'm going to buy 60 of them myself. [laughs]

Dinah: There are many copies of Moby Dick in PEM’s Phillipis Library collection. But this one is probably the most shocking. Also by California artist Billy O'Callaghan who has his own press called Improper Printing. This edition is called Moby Dick or redacted to queer.

Dan: "A hot old man. I guess he's got what some folks ashore call a conscience. 'I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,' muttered Stub as he found himself descending the cabin scuttle."

FADE OUT

Dinah: OK, OK, enough of that for now, you'll have to read the book to find these references on your own.

Dan: Bill O'Callaghan is thinking about the homoeroticism and the homoromanticism of Melville and those aspects of Moby Dick that have that homoerotic flavor to them. There's this current line of scholarship which is concerned with Melville and his romantic interests. He looked up to Hawthorne to an extent as a mentor. And Hawthorne's work helped encourage Melville to make Moby Dick darker and more sinister than it had been before he had encountered Hawthorne. They lived very close to one another in Western Massachusetts so they did have some personal contact. To an extent, Melville probably had a crush on Hawthorne.

Dinah: That’s right. According to new scholarship, says Dan, researchers are asking, just how big was Melville’s crush on Hawthorne? Well, big enough to dedicate his masterpiece to him.

Dan: There's some evidence of that in his manuscripts and letters in between the two.

Dinah: We don’t call him Hotty Hawthorne for nothing. If you haven’t seen our portrait of Hawthorne on view, just know that his ruddy cheeks are worth a long gaze. You can find that portrait in an exhibition on the first floor of the museum called On this Ground: Being and Belonging in America.

Nat: Moving to Nantucket almost 40 years ago now, I became interested in whaling through the lens of Moby Dick, my favorite book.

Dinah: Nathaniel Philbrick again.

Nat: It was learning how important Hawthorne was to Melville that just upped the personal ante

Dinah: I lived on Nantucket almost 25 years ago when Nat’s book, based on the account of a Nantucket whaleship being stove by a whale, was published. Brand new to the island and it’s newspaper, I got to interview Nat about what would become this award-winning bestseller, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.

Nat: It wasn't until relatively late that I realized I had been named for Hawthorne. Here's the person I'm named for and Moby Dick is dedicated to him. Hawthorne could not have been more different from Melville, 15 years older, a shy, a reclusive type. When Melville met Hawthorne, Hawthorne had just published "The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne would have this pivotal influence on Moby Dick. Reading Hawthorne's short stories, Melville became acquainted with what he called his “power of darkness.” He completely reconceived what would have been, I think, a fairly conventional, almost romantic novel about American whaling into something altogether different and invented the character of Ahab. And it all goes to Nathaniel Hawthorne and being someone who goes into dark territory himself, I feel it kind of personally.

Dinah: Melville was young, in his early 30s, and part of what Philbrick writes was a young, still tentative literary tradition in America. While working on the book, Melville moved his family to a farmhouse in Western Massachusetts, near where Hawthorne was living. While writing, he enjoyed a view of nearby Mount Greylock. When the snow blanketed the surrounding fields that winter, Philbrick writes, Melville enjoyed a sort of “sea feeling.”

Dan: It's very much tied to the history and culture of coastal Massachusetts in the 19th century. I'm originally from Sandwich, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. I recall going to Martha's Vineyard in Nantucket as a kid, and growing up very close to the sea, you just have this awareness and appreciation for maritime things.

Dinah: So what role has this epic novel played in the life of our library director here at the museum?

Dan: It's one of those novels that I don't necessarily read anymore from page one to the end, but instead, I'm dipping in every so often. It's so laden with ideas, deep thoughts, and cynical funny asides that it's so engaging and rich. Part of it is that the genius of Moby Dick was not recognized in Melville's life. Its reception was pretty mixed. Actually, there were accusations of blasphemy and quite a bit of hostility towards Melville because of his takes on religion in particular. It didn't sell very well. He died in 1891 thinking it was a complete failure. It took a revival of Melville scholarship, in the aftermath of the centenary of his birth in 1919, for scholars to go back and really look at Melville and his work and to reassess what Moby Dick was.

Nat: It's kind of overwhelming, really, for me because it's a novel that has meant so much to me. To watch it enter the culture in such a deep seated way is amazing, but also perplexing for me. Moby Dick has inspired so many works of art, music. There's an opera about Moby Dick. There's plays. There's a movie. I mean, everything. It's a novel that was about whaling that continues to be eternally relevant the farther and farther we get from the circumstances under which Melville wrote it.

Dinah: Still unconvinced you want to invest the time it takes to chase this whale’s tale?

Nat: I have deep sympathy for people who say the book is too long. It's a book that goes all over the map. There is a very interesting plot there. But part of Melville's point, the reason why he threw the original novel out and redid it was to create something different than a conventionally plotted novel. To do something that got at the haphazard, slapdash nature of life that stops and starts that wiggles and waggles the way Moby Dick supposedly did. Yes, it's long. It's frustrating. All I can say is I think you have to be at least Melville's age, 31, before you have the life experience and the patience to see it through. I am convinced if you wait it out and return to it later in life, you have more of a perspective to bring to it, you'll, at some point, see your way all the way through Moby Dick.

Dinah: That’s our show. Thanks for listening. We’ve enjoyed watching partners all over the region getting into Melville this summer. I recently went out to the Berkshires, where you can tour Melville’s home Arrowhead. And could not help but notice that on August 5th, hikers were invited to scramble up Monument Mountain, just as Melville and Hawthorne did in 1850.

Draw me Ishmael: The Book Arts of Moby Dick is on view through January 4, 2026. To learn more, go to pem.org. There is still time to join PEM Reads and make your way – with an online group – through this epic tale. Special thanks to Nathaniel Philbrick, whose book Why Read Moby Dick can be found in the PEM Shop. Thank you to PEM’s Meg Boeni and Dan Lipcan. This episode of the PEMcast was produced by me, Dinah Cardin, and edited and mixed by Erika Sutter. Our theme song is by former PEM staff person Forest James, whose music you can find on Soundcloud and Spotify. Curious about that portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne and other things in the PEM collection? We have a new collection highlights tour. Stop by and take PEM in an Hour, guided by Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, PEM’s Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Executive Director and CEO. The PEMcast is generously supported by the George S. Parker fund.