Popular Press
Swimming Through Libraries
Humanities
(2009)
Abstract
“Call me Ishmael” is undoubtedly the most famous sentence of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; but it is not, despite popular belief, the first—at least, not exactly. Between the novel’s title page and Ishmael’s self-introduction are two chapters of decidedly bookish front matter: first, an “Etymology” of the word “whale,” including its Hebrew, Latin, and Greek forms; and, second, a collection of whale-related “Extracts” drawn from the Bible, Pliny’s Natural History, Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, James Fenimore Cooper’s Pilot, and a remarkable variety of other sources. The narrator claims that these prefaces were compiled by “a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School” and “a poor devil of a Sub-Sub” librarian, respectively. But, of course, both the “usher” and the “sub-sub” are inventions: It was Melville himself who had, as he put it, “gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane.”
Keywords
- digital humanities
Disciplines
Publication Date
July, 2009
Citation Information
James Williford. "Swimming Through Libraries" Humanities Vol. 30 Iss. 4 (2009) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/steven_olsen-smith/17/