Moby Dick

Published as The Whale in London in 1851 and as Moby Dick in New York, this epic tale of adventure at sea dissects bourgeois, urban America — “that gas-lit barbarism” (Baudelaire). A narrative of life at sea that is also a genuine encyclopedic summa, Herman Melville blends every genre. Among the major sources of this monstrous corpus one might cite, indiscriminately, the Odyssey, the Bible, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Poe and Hawthorne, to whom the novel is dedicated.

The French translation, by Lucien Jacques, Joan Smith and Jean Giono, began appearing in May 1938 in Les Cahiers du Contadour, starting with no. V and continuing through the final issue, no. VIII, in February 1939. The declaration of war abruptly ended the pacifist-literary venture of the Contadour and the publication of the Cahiers bearing its name. This limited and unfinished edition was superseded by the one published by Gallimard in 1941.

A very fine copy in the publisher’s boards designed after a model by Paul Bonet, issued in November 1941, three months after the text appeared in the collection blanche. While this volume is not particularly rare, its dust jacket is: here it survives in as-new condition.

Rare thus.