Before You Begin

Before you begin.

"Call me Ishmael." With three of the most famous words in literature, a restless young man goes down to the sea and signs aboard the whaleship Pequod — only to find her commanded by a captain with one ivory leg and one consuming purpose: to hunt down and destroy the great white whale, Moby Dick, that maimed him. What follows is at once a thrilling adventure of the old whaling trade and a vast meditation on obsession, fate, and the unknowable sea.

Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) was little read in its own time and is now widely called the greatest American novel — a storm-tossed epic of Ahab and Ishmael, Queequeg and Starbuck, and the white whale that has haunted the imagination ever since.

This illustrated companion opens the voyage into a gallery of plates — the crew of the Pequod and their portraits, the map of the ports and oceans of her voyage, the great scenes, and six movement plates you unlock as you read, marking the six great tides of this vast book without revealing what waits ahead. Now — the sea is calling.