Herman Melville
The
Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. By Herman
Melville. Authorised Edition. London: Longman, Brown, Green,
Longmans, & Roberts, 1857. —This is one of the wildest
rides in American literature, and here is a neatly-printed
one-volume edition in a very good scan.
Israel
Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. By Herman
Melville. New York: G. P. Putnam & Co., 1855.
Another
copy.
Moby-Dick;
or, the Whale. By Herman Melville. New York:
Harper & Brothers, Publishers. London: Richard Bentley.
1851. —This is a scan of a facsimile of the first edition; it
is available in full view, but Velvet Element Books claims an
unenforceable copyright on the images.
The same first edition
at archive.org, without spurious copyright restrictions, in a very good
scan from Duke University, including Melville's autograph.
Moby
Dick; or, the Whale. By Herman Melville.
Illustrated by I. W. Taber. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1902. —Gorgeous illustrations (see the frontispiece above) in
an edition published shortly after Melville's forgotten
masterpiece was rediscovered. —Like most editions published shortly after the rediscovery of Moby-Dick,
this one transposes the "Etymology" and "Extracts" at the beginning of the
book to the back, which deprives them of their significance in setting the atmosphere for the drama to follow.
It may be of interest to students of Melville to
read the short tale that inspired Melville's masterpiece: Mocha
Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a
Manuscript Journal. By J. N. Reynolds, Esq., in
the Knickerbocker for May, 1839.
Pierre;
or, the Ambiguities. By Herman Melville. New York:
Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1852.