TMDC profiled in The Providence Athenaeum on line Blog

There is profile of the editor and TMDC on the Raven-ous Blog from nice folks at the Providence Athenaeum.

1972 Norton Critical Edition

Here is the 1972 Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, the iconic book for any English Class be it high school or college. 

The inside is inscribed: Best to Mr. Badgley, from Ted.  Other than that, there is not a mark in the volume. Too bad, as we always like to see the parts that are important to the reader. Perhaps, Mr. Badgley already had a copy and he was too shy to own up to Ted.

1972 is the year I graduated from Middlebury College, which reminds me that Chapter 2 contains the following: "as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with the darkness to the south..."  

That sentence conjures up for me the memories of those rare crossroads of life I have been at, as in 1972, when I was forced to compare the darkness of the past with the gloom of the future. 

So too is Ishmael, not just at that moment having to decide where to lodge for the evening, but also he must make a choice with his life which the out come is uncertain.

Again, I find myself at one of those crossroads.  

A bit of the background to The Moby Dick Collection

And here is an interview with Mary Darcy for All Over Albany. It is a decent overview of the whole THE MOBY DICK COLLECTION blog... Thanks for all the support!

Mr. Pettit

1947 Oxford University Press Deluxe

This is a lovely volume, in size and shape. Good to hold in the hand, and the feel of the cover boards is substantial.

The type setting is clean, even, and elegant. It would be an awesome book to hold and read.

At some point Marty Matheson signed the inside fly leaf with her name and June '74. Clearly by the ware on the boards, she read some if not all of it.

In looking over this volume, I reread the first paragraph, where Ishmael puts down that when ever he gets out of sorts, especially in November, whenever his dark side begins to win the struggle, and when he is fighting the urge to step into the street, and methodically knock peoples' hats off, he then knows its "high time to get to sea"

He states that going to sea is his "substitute for pistol and ball."

In preventing his becoming a mass murderer, Ishmael chooses to leave a world of independence and solitude and chooses interdependence and involvement by here in this story signing up on a whaleship which by its own nature is a small concise world where it is impossible to be alone.

It is getting colder here in Albany, November is around the corner, and some days I want to step into the street and knock guys ball caps off.  

I am reminded that my dad and my grandads hats did not have ball teams logos on them. Those guys had style and were men of independence and solitude. That is my world too. Yet deep within the sea is calling me.  

Now is the time to sign up for the Marathon reading of MD.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Moby-Dick Marathon celebrates its sixteenth annual non-stop reading of Herman Melville’s literary masterpiece with a 3-day program of entertaining activities and events on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, January 6-8, 2012.
Should you want to participate here is the URL to sign up http://whalingmuseum.org/prog/marathon2012.html

Melville's Marginalia Online

Here is a fascinating website. Its a digital library of Herman Milville's books. Not only that,  it is a collection of the pages with his markings on them.http://melvillesmarginalia.org/browser.php?page=1

New York Times Book Review

The other day we got an email from Laura O'Neill, Photo Editor, The New York Times. Seems they needed some books for an upcoming cover of the New York Times Book Review.  They are planning some sort of MD cover.

Heck ya!

So the above photo shows Nathaniel Brooks, New York Times Photographer, shooting covers of The Moby Dick Collection editions, many of which have been featured in previous blog posts.

The up coming cover will be made up of these photographs from this MOBY DICK COLLECTION!

On the left is a Currier and Ives print of "Little Willie" which had been in White Foam for years. That PRINT is about 150 yrs old.   Its all been kind of a weird and fun summer.

Oh yea, and in 50 years if the NYT Book Review wants to feature covers of Moby Dick, The Moby Dick Collection will still exist (we have made provisions) and be ready to supply, but most of the kindles, IPADs, Nooks, that exist today will be in the land fill, and the Moby Dick edition on them is just digital. Its just digital.

We love ink.

Just got word from the NYT that the 10/23 edition will contain the photos of the covers and there will be a slide show on line beginning a day or two earlier. !

Lake Zurich Public Library Moby-Dick

Recent purchase from EBAY, the Grosset and Dunlap edition of MOBY DICK. Ex Lib from the Lake ZURICH PUBLIC Library, marked with the big D on the front, D for discard.

While the book is undated, it perhaps is a 70's imprint since the Library was formed in 1973. 

The only date stamp in the book is Apr 18 1979, presumably the patron returned it since this book was clearly discarded from the system.

Library bindings are purposeful and well thought out. This book has decades more use in it, and thus can be viewed as a testament to our wasteful society, there is no rational reason that this book could not have sat on ELAArea Public Library's shelves for years to come and been recirculated thru the population. Other than it is not perfection. Perfection is never achieved, by the way, its only a phantom.

We enjoy folks who aim for perfection, enjoy them a lot.