The Whale, the Silver copy in a contemporary binding - photo 1
The Whale, the Silver copy in a contemporary binding - photo 2
The Whale, the Silver copy in a contemporary binding - photo 3

The Whale, the Silver copy in a contemporary binding

Lot 126
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Sold
$ 170 100
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
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ID 967595
Lot 126 | The Whale, the Silver copy in a contemporary binding
Estimate value
$ 120 000 – 180 000
The Whale, the Silver copy in a contemporary binding

Herman Melville, 1851

MELVILLE, Herman (1819-1891). The Whale. London: Richard Bentley, 1851.



The true first edition of Melville's masterpiece, this London edition preceded the American edition by a month. This handsome copy in contemporary calf is one of 500 copies printed, few of which have survived. "This edition was set up from Harper proof-sheets, which were edited to some extent by Bentley, without Melville's knowledge. The editing consisted of toning down profanity and some alleged irreverent references; also, the 'Epilogue' was omitted, which caused at least one English review to comment on the impossibility of a first-person narrative, when everyone on the Pequod was killed by the white whale's attack" (Grolier). Copies in contemporary bindings are rare at auction; this is the only one recorded in RBH in the past 25 years.



When Herman Melville moved to the Berkshires to escape the confines of his Fourth Avenue house in New York, he divided his time between farming and writing the novel that would follow White-Jacket. He evidently set out to write another potboiler: when he wrote to his British publisher Richard Bentley he said that he was at work on a novel that was to be "a romance of adventure founded upon certain wild legends of the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries." His intensified reading of Shakespeare and Carlyle pointed him in a vastly different direction, however, as did reports of 19th-century adventures at sea. Owen Chase's Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex (1821), a rare book even at the time, was found for Melville by his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw and provided the author with the seeds of his story. News of the killing in the late 1830s of the Mocha Whale, an albino sperm whale which had attacked ships and evaded hunters for years, gave shape to the great elusive figure of Moby Dick. Though he originally thought the manuscript could be delivered to the publisher by December 1850, it was not finished until the following autumn. An excellent copy of a legendary rarity and one of the great American books. No great collection of American literature is complete without The Whale. BAL 13663; Grolier American 60; Sadleir Excursions p. 229; Sadleir 1685 ("one of the rarest of three-deckers").



Three volumes, octavo (188 x 120mm). Half-title in volume 1 only as issued. Contemporary black calf gilt over marbled boards (a few chips to calf at heads and along raised bands, joints showing a little wear but holding, covers and extremities a little rubbed); modern chemise and quarter morocco slipcase. Provenance: Irwin Silver, Sotheby's New York, 26 April 2005, lot 89) – Sotheby's New York, 21 June 2019, lot 212.

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