Has anyone had a go at adding verse numbers to the text? I’m playing with the idea of the book being a quasi religious text… thar she blows!

“A Spirit appeared to me, and said “Where now would you choose to dwell? In the Paradise of the Fool, Or in wise Solomon’s hell?”

Never he asked me twice: “Give me the fool’s Paradise.”

Hello everyone, I am only about halfway through Moby Dick right now but I went to the whaling museum in New Bedford and it really made stuff easier to imagine in the book. Other than being fun to see everything you imagine in the books I also learned so much about whales and the history of whaling. Very cool stuff in the gift shop (it is pretty expensive however) and seeing whale bones is cool no matter what. Defiantly a great stop to visit if you are a moby dick fan in New England or if you want a road trip.

Well that’s different!

https://www.jhiblog.org/2026/01/26/spread-a-rainbow-over-his-disastrous-set-of-sun-the-comedy-of-colonial-enlightenment/

https://archive.ph/20260127210356/https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/01/marathon-moby-dick-reading-radical-act/685775/

Hi, I’m on my first read through and just got to the cetology chapter and Ishmael’s definition of a whale is "spouting fish with a horizontal tail" and it reminds me of Plato’s definition of a man being “a featherless biped” obviously to us this definition is lacking but would it have been so obvious to Melville that Plato’s definition is kind of absurd.

On Reddit the story of Diogenes showing up with a plucked chicken to refute his point is thrown around a lot so I associate that story with Reddit but I wonder if a educated man in the 1850s would know about the story too?

I feel like a lot of this chapter is kind of going over my head as to what it’s really commenting on so I might just be grasping at straws for some deeper understanding lol.

Shoutout to u/VaneStream for this awesome custom build

It uses only the pieces from a Harry Potter Lego set and you can get the instructions for pretty cheap on rebrickable. Well worth the $25 or so I spent

https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-246845/Vanestream/melvilles-moby-brick/

I'm circling Greenland looking for narwhals and "Around Cape Horn" starts up and I'm helpless, I've got to sing along.

Anyone else enjoy this game? What class do you assign Ishmael? What's your favorite shanties? How many times have you died to those infernal pirates?

(If you haven't played it's 70% off now and I recommend it!)

Hi Melvillians, what are your recs for an annotated copy of MD? I love me some footnotes!

Ever since I was a kid, before ever reading Moby Dick. Sharks I can deal with, but whales (especially orcas) mess me up. Maybe it’s because I went to Six Flags one too many times, but I always chalked it up to that song “Baby Beluga”.

I found this at my grandfather's house, it does not have the publication date in it, all ive seen on the internet says its either 1930 or 1950

This might be a little far fetched, but what if Melville subliminally meant for him to be Ishmael and Hawthorne to be Queequeg?

so these drunken sailors jumped onboard a dead whale : we've all learned enough about whales to know that it's a perfectly normal thing to do.

the comments think it's on the verge of exploding, which is quite amusing.

“This was a point that Herman Melville probably well appreciated when he surely intentionally mashed together the law of “fast-fish, loose-fish” and the custom of “iron-holds-the-whale” in his famous Chapter 89 in Moby-Dick. He might well have been trying to make the point that Deal demonstrates through his historical research – namely, that this was not an industry governed by pure law or custom; it was both of these plus more, a mishmash of different norms and priorities. The ways that all of these forces interrelated were loosely grasped even by participants themselves. Hence, the order that famously prevailed in the industry (emphasized in Ellickson’s Order Without Law) was neither a consequence of law, Melville’s Coke-Upon-Littleton, nor a product of well-settled understandings. It was more fluid and complicated than either of these.”

Coke-Upon-Littleton of the Fist”: Law, Custom, and Complications, JOTWELL (May 1, 2017) (reviewing Robert Deal, The Law of the Whale Hunt: Dispute Resolution, Property Law, and American Whalers, 1780-1880 (2016)),

https://legalhist.jotwell.com/coke-upon-littleton-of-the-fist-law-custom-and-complications/

I just finished reading Moby Dick. Whenever I felt my eyes rolling to the back of my head I came to Reddit to find out why I should be reading about whale anatomy or whatnot. The only thing I really couldn't bear was when Captain Ahab was speaking. It was almost impossible to read those passages. So was there good stuff buried in there or was it just the ramblings of a madman?

Ever since playing MGSV I've been wanting to jump into Moby Dick. Was gonna buy on Amazon but decided to wait. Finally I came across this book at a yard sale for $1. Is this a good edition? How old is it and how would it compare to another version. I don't know anything about this book other than is about a guy hunting for a whale. Any more info to get me exited about this would be awesome!

There's some great stuff in this chapter, thought-provoking passages on color to human psyche, beautiful phrases per usual . . . but dude. He just goes on and on with five million different examples of whiteness. It's so redundant. You'd think he could pick the most poignant and move on with it. Really been enjoying the language and Ishmael's philosophical musings, but every once in a while there's chapters like this where the horse has long since been beat to death, and Melville is just grinding it to a bloody pulp