1930 Rare First Edition - Moby Dick by Melville illustrated by Rockwell Kent

The landmark 1930 first Random House one-volume edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, magnificently illustrated and designed by Rockwell Kent, whose stark black-and-white imagery helped restore the novel to the centre of American literary culture.

Author: Herman Melville. Illustrated by Rockwell Kent.
Title: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.
Publisher: New York: Random House, 1930.
Edition: First Random House Edition and First One-Volume Trade Edition illustrated by Rockwell Kent, following the celebrated three-volume limited Lakeside Press edition of 1929.
Language: English.
Pages: xxxi, 822 pages.
Size: 7.5 x 5.5 inches.
Binding: Very good original publisher’s black cloth binding, strikingly decorated in silver after Rockwell Kent, with the enormous title above Kent’s iconic breaching whale on the front board and a dramatic whale-tail design to the spine. The silver remains remarkably strong and attractive. Light rubbing and scuffing to the boards, with minor wear and gentle bumping at the corners and spine extremities, as shown. Hinges sound and binding firm. Protected in a removable mylar cover. 
Content: Very good content, complete, tight and generally clean throughout, with the expected light age toning and occasional minor spotting. Some foxing and toning to the endpapers, particularly toward the margins, as shown. Pages remain well preserved and all illustrations are present.
Illustrations: Profusely illustrated throughout by Rockwell Kent with powerful full-page and in-text black-and-white illustrations, decorative chapter openings, vignettes and typographic elements. Kent’s bold, highly graphic imagery transforms Melville’s maritime epic into one of the defining achievements of twentieth-century American book illustration.

Estimate: $650–700 USD.

The book:

First published in 1851, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale follows Ishmael aboard the whaling ship Pequod, commanded by the obsessive Captain Ahab, whose pursuit of the great white whale becomes one of literature’s most enduring explorations of fate, obsession, nature and the limits of human knowledge. Initially a commercial disappointment, Melville’s novel was gradually rediscovered in the early twentieth century and is now regarded as one of the great achievements of American literature.

This 1930 Random House edition occupies a particularly important place in that revival. Rockwell Kent had originally illustrated Moby-Dick for the magnificent three-volume Lakeside Press edition of 1929. Its artistic success was so considerable that Random House issued this more accessible one-volume edition the following year, retaining Kent’s celebrated imagery and striking visual design. The result became one of the most recognizable illustrated editions of Moby-Dick ever published and a landmark of American book design.

The author:

Herman Melville (1819–1891) was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet whose adventurous early life at sea profoundly shaped his fiction. After achieving early popularity with works such as Typee and Omoo, he produced the far more ambitious Moby-Dick in 1851. Its dense symbolism, philosophical scope and unconventional structure found relatively little contemporary appreciation, and Melville’s literary reputation declined during his lifetime.

The twentieth-century “Melville Revival” transformed that reputation. Scholars, writers and artists rediscovered Moby-Dick as a work of extraordinary imaginative and intellectual power, and it has since become central to the American literary canon.

The illustrator:

Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, designer and writer whose distinctive graphic style combined monumental forms, dramatic contrasts and a deep fascination with wilderness and the sea. His extensive travels to remote regions including Alaska, Greenland and Tierra del Fuego informed much of his artistic vision.

Kent’s illustrations for Moby-Dick are widely regarded as his masterpiece in book illustration. His stark black-and-white compositions perfectly complement Melville’s elemental themes of man, ocean and destiny. The success of the 1929 Lakeside Press edition, followed by this 1930 Random House issue, played an important role both in establishing Kent’s reputation as a book artist and in introducing a new generation of readers to Melville’s novel.