MY highschool edition, Moby-Dick

1964, fall, back seat of a maroon Buick Electra, head down, eyes shut, sat a young boy. His parents were following a hundred years of Yankee tradition by taking the boy to private school for four years of schooling.

The school, Tabor Academy, was going to be four years of fun, growing up, sailing, smoking, and drinking! only as a lad of 14 could do, away from parents...

This is the high school copy I bought for the English Lit class that I took, paid $1.05 for a brand new copy, as I write this, I have no recollection of the teacher, the class, or of reading any of the book...

In the post about the Japanese Edition, I relate the circumstances about how and when I actually read this book.

I have repeatedly gone back to this book to re read all or parts of the novel. There are, however, no notes, and no underlinings. That is something I have yet to do. I know all of my favorite passages, where they are and why I like them...

On the inside back cover, there is a rudimentary chart of my family tree, as some time, I wrote that, for what purpose I dont remember...

Next post: An academic gem!

1984 Bantam Classic, Moby-Dick

A humble gift, with meaning beyond the written word.

Over the years friends and friends of friends, have heard about my obsession, and occasionally they have dropped by and given me their copies of the novel.

Here is the 1984 Bantam Classic, clearly, well read dirt on the edge from fingers, folds on the pages where the reader stopped to rest....

How could a IPAD had that kind of intimacy? oh well...

Zach Cohen gave me this book one day... Zach is a wonderful guitarist and the son of my good long term friend, Lee Cohen.

Zach, mid 20's, read this book in high school, and as he gave it to me, he said: "I didn't like the type, it was hard to read, someone showed me the Norton edition and that was much better, wish I had read that."


Next up: My high school edition, the book that launched an obsession.

x-library 1922 Oxford, Moby-Dick

#14 in the collection is a wonderful x-library Oxford edition from "The World's Classics", 1922 reprint.

Its a Michigan Library, rebound, beaten up, underlined and well read. This is the kind of thing that no KINDLE could ever duplicate....

On the inside cover someone sometime wrote the following:

Moby Dick an encyclopedia of whaling information bogs down in its morass of data. Incidental tales are interlaced with factual material. However the chase of the white whale by Captain Ahab in the Pequod with its symbolic and ... crew can be pieced together into an exciting tale. The last three days of the chase are the most exciting in the story and might well be read. No youngster who has ever seen a ship will forget the sinking Pequod with a hawk fluttering vainly in the streaming flag on its mainmast as its sails to Davy Jones Locker.

While I transcribed this I needed to review the last pages to understand the reference to the hawk, and immediately I wanted to sit in my reading chair, cup of tea, cigar and read this book...

1995 Italian Language Edition, Moby-Dick

In 2003 on Ebay I aquired this edition, #65 in the collection (the collection number is meaningless) and no record has survive of how much I paid for it or from whence it came.

The book is a 1995 printing and on the back cover the price is listed as Lire 17.600 nicely predating the EURO.

I thought it was a bit thin, but what the heck for all I know Italian could be a very precise language so less words are needed. But later I noted the line on the title page: Riduzione e traduzione di Giorgio Bertone. Traduzione could mean translated but what is Riduzione? It seems that means reduced so: drat this is an abridged copy.

This collection is to have no abridged copies, that is my rule, hard and fast... except any book given to me by my soon to be daughter in law, Sasha, she has given me the comic editions and uber abridged editions from her childhood, and those I cherish...

Oh well, so much for hard and fast rules....

So who is Giorgio Bertone? Check here for other books he wrote.

and here