Storehouse.

Herman Melville’s epic Moby-Dick was first published as The Whale on October 18, 1851 – the book was “expurgated to avoid offending delicate political and moral sensibilities”. In November of that year, the uncensored version, featuring the Epilogue telling of how Ishmael survived to tell his tale, was published in the USA. Now called Moby-Dick, the long book, with its educational, insightful, obsessive and not a little prolix chapters on whaling and the whale, was not an instant hit. The book that most of us with a desire to write wish they had written was far from universally enjoyed. It still isn’t. Clive James wrote in 2007: “It’s not so much that I find language contortedly and even wilfully archaic: more than that I find it makes a meal of itself, as if foretelling a modern critical age in which it is fated more to be taught than enjoyed.”

Nowadays the book’s a ‘classic’, but how many of us have read all the words – 135 chapters – and finished it? Not many. Not enough. Garrison Keillor noted in 2016: “With the time I’ve wasted over the past 40 years looking for my reading glasses, I could have written Moby-Dick and written it better. Not all that yik-yak about melancholy and breakfast and the nature of evil, but cut to the chase and harpoon the dang whale and bring a couple of dames aboard the Pequod for the general interest.” He was only half joking. He’d never read the thing.

Moby Dick is a “storehouse of language, incident and strange wisdom”, the story of the heroic whale who endures a persistent effort to exterminate it. The book is worth the effort. But it takes time. We need help. We need a way to let us move through the book. Step forward artist and librarian Matt Kish, who took on the mammoth task of illustrating the book’s 552 pages of what he calls “the greatest novel ever written”.

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Matt Kish on Moby-Dick ...