MOBY-DICK; OR THE WHALE, BY HERMAN MELVILLE, AUTHOR OF "TYPEE," "OMOO," "REDBURN," MARDI," "WHITE-JACKET"

Note: entry originally published Monday, December 31, 2007.

The Penguin Classics edition of the text features a facsimile of the first American printing of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. This edition was published by Harper and Brothers (formerly J. & J. Harper). Harper and Brothers was, by 1850 a significant publishing house in New York, having published the first editions of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and the first American editions of Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. In 1844 James, the eldest of the brothers successfully campaigned for Mayor of New York City. The company also produced several family magazines, including Harper's Bazar (which was bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1913, and Harper's New Monthly Magazine, still published today as Harper's Monthly by the Harper's Magazine Foundation.

Moby-Dick was first published in 1851, ten years before the outbreak of the American Civil War. It wasn't well-received immediately. In fact, as Andrew Delbanco points out in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, the Cambridge History of American Literature (1917), mentioned Melville only in relation to two earlier books, Typee and its sequal, Omoo, in a chapter concerning travel narratives.

In the 1800s and earlier, it was common pratice for publishers to hark back to an author's previous works, hoping to tap into a "brand loyalty" within the reader a century or more before branding became a buzz-word in boardrooms and business schools. Often it was the authors themselves that would add this flourish, more often in the hope of more sales than out of conceit, although in the case of Moby-Dick, it was probably effected by the publishers.