From Moby Dick: Plate 37

Moby Dick is full of iconic images: from Ahab nailing a gold doubloon to the mast of the Pequod, to the climactic battle with the white whale.  We know you will be thrilled by the inimitable Henry "Soupcan" Sanchez's loving renditions of all of your favorite scenes.  But we have received dozens of letters from Melville fans with one burning question on their minds - what about that part where a guy wears a chopped-off whale penis around like a cloak?

Rest easy, literature fans.  We would never remove one of the most important dick jokes in American literature.

Plate 37 - The cassock of the Archbishoprick, is what Melville actually called this situation in his serious literary masterpiece

From Moby Dick, Modern Illustrated Classics Edition. By Herman Melville, et al.  Ill by Henry "Soupcan" Sanchez.  Preorder your copy today!

An Excerpt from Moby Dick: On the Bigness of Whales

It took our editors a long time to shorten down a classic like Moby Dick, while still keeping the prose style as dense and unreadable as Melville fans demand.  We are pleased with our work, it goes without saying. Enjoy this selection from Chapter 384: On the Bigness of Whales.

Whales, as elsewhere noted, have foremost among their many qualities a characteristic which can only be called bigness.  This was accounted by even by the most ancient of seafaring peoples, whose conception of the bigness and smallness of diverse objects was not nearly so refined in degree as our modern sensibilities now permit.  In fact, the bigness of the whale is described in some detail by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History as "exceedingley bigge."

Plate 54: A sperm whale, with a little bitty Abraham Lincoln to demonstrate scale. Abraham Lincoln was a deal when this was written, right?

 Whales are bigger than any animal and most trees.  Their bigness exceeds even that of many buildings, tents, smallish boats, or rail cars.  In my travels, I saw many whales, and while some were bigger than others, all of them left me filled with an understanding, nay a glimpse, of the meaning of bigness.  Even a calf whale, not a few months old, is bigger than five barrels of pickles or a good-sized horse.  Even in smallness, their bigness is apparent.

 The bigness of the whale extends beyond the fish itself, however, into an infinite idea of bigness.  Any one whale can only offer a fleeting glimmer of this bigness beyond size, beyond weight.  The white whale’s bigness, and the bigger bignesses which lay beyond its white and twisted body, perhaps offered the seeds of the madness which plagued our Captain.

From Moby Dick, Modern Illustrated Classics Edition. By Herman Melville, et al.  Ill by Henry "Soupcan" Sanchez.  Preorder your copy today!

Introducing: Moby Dick

It's our goal at Modern Illustrated Classics to make big, difficult books accessible to even the most brain-addled millennial.  And where better to start than Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick.  This book, hailed by many as the Great American Novel, is a gripping story of whales, revenge, madness, and droning on about whales some more.  Our editorial team has carefully distilled this masterpiece to a mere one million pages (less than a tenth of its original length).

This handsomely bound and lavishly illustrated volume will feature:

• All the gay subtext you could hope for.
• Even more chapters, somehow.
• The parts where Melville argues that whales are fish, even though they breathe air with lungs and nurse their young with milk. And even though people had known those facts for, literally, over two thousand years.
• Pirates! Arr.
• Pictures of knots.
• Great parts to stop reading without even realizing it and just kind of zone out for a couple of minutes, until you forget what you've read and have to start the whole damn page over.
• There were pirates in this, right? Cause I'm pretty sure there are now.

While supplies last, each copy of this edition will come with a free ticket to Sea World, so you can experience the ocean's gentle giants being tortured in real life. Available wherever books are still being sold.