An Excerpt from Lord of the Rings: Bombadil's 16th Song

From our newest masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings: Tom Bombadil Edition, we present one of Bombadil's most delightful and whimsical songs.  Feel free to sing along as you read!

As Bombadil took the Hobbits' dinner plates, he began to dance and sing another song, which went as follows: 

Tom’s a merry Bombadil,
His songs are full of laughter.
He sings them all the night and day
Through six or seven chapters.
Ring the dong a dally-o
Six or seven Chapters.

Plate 12: The Hobbits are once again filled with wonder and delight as Bombadil launches into another merry tune.

When the world was first begun,
Tom climbed a mountain top.
He started to sing his gayest songs
And it seems he hasn’t stopped.
Dong the bong the billy bob
It seems he can’t be stopped.

I’ll sing and dance a merry jig,
And prance around and shout,
And do a bunch of other stuff
That you don’t care about.
Hi the ho a dilly-o
You sure don’t care about.

But if you try to skip ahead,
My singing for to quell,
Just wait ‘till you see how many songs
They sing in Rivendell.
Dilly derpy dumpy-o
Just wait ‘till Rivendell.

From The Lord of the Rings, Modern Illustrated Classics Edition. By J.R.R. Tolkien et al.  Ill. by Henry "Soupcan" Sanchez.  Preorder your copy today!

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!