Rockwell Kent Woodcut Illustrated 1930 Moby Dick Herman Melville Hardcover

Hardcover. 8vo. Square. Published by Random House, New York. 1930. xxxi, 822 pgs. Illustrated with Black and White Plates. Bound in black cloth with silver pictorial design on the spine and front cover. Boards have shelf-wear present to the extremities (boards are lightly faded and lightly chipped at the crown of the spine). Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. Moby Dick looms large in America's literary consciousness — and the style and philosophical content of Melville's 1851 epic was generations ahead of its time. Today the chronicle of a vengeful captain's obsessive, self-destructive search for a white whale ranks among the great American novels, and this volume does full justice to its preeminence. 7/1 1930 Moby Dick of the Whale Herman Melville Rockwell Kent 7/1 1930 Moby Dick of the Whale Herman Melville Rockwell Kent

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Description

Up For Sale Today is

Moby Dickor The Whale

by

Herman Melville

illustrated by

Rockwell Kent

Hardcover. 8vo. Square. Published by Random House, New York. 1930. xxxi, 822 pgs. Illustrated with Black and White Plates. 

Bound in black cloth with silver pictorial design on the spine and front cover. Boards have shelf-wear present to the extremities (boards are lightly faded and lightly chipped at the crown of the spine). Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. 

Moby Dick looms large in America's literary consciousness — and the style and philosophical content of Melville's 1851 epic was generations ahead of its time. Today the chronicle of a vengeful captain's obsessive, self-destructive search for a white whale ranks among the great American novels, and this volume does full justice to its preeminence.

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882 – March 13, 1971) was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, and writer.Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York, the same year as fellow American artists George Bellows and Edward Hopper. Kent lived much of his early life in and around New York City where he attended the Horace Mann School, and moved in his mid-40s to an Adirondack farmstead that he called Asgaard where he lived and painted until his death. Kent studied with the influential painters and theorists of his day. He studied composition and design with Arthur Wesley Dow at the Art Students League in the fall of 1900, and he studied painting with William Merritt Chase each of the three summers between 1900 and 1902 after which he entered, in the fall of 1902 Robert Henri's class at the New York School of Art, which Chase had founded. During the summer of 1903 Kent was apprenticed to painter and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer. An undergraduate background in architecture at Columbia University prepared Kent for occasional work in the 1900s and 1910s as a draftsman and carpenter. At the Art Students League he would meet and befriend the artists Wilhelmina Weber Furlong and Thomas Furlong.

Kent's early paintings of Mount Monadnock and New Hampshire were first shown at the Society of American Artists in New York in 1904, when Dublin Pond was purchased by Smith College. In 1905 Kent ventured to Monhegan Island, Maine, where he based himself for the next five years. His first series of paintings of Monhegan were shown in 1907 at Clausen Galleries in New York to wide critical acclaim, and they form the foundation of his lasting reputation as an early American modernist. Among those lauding Kent was critic James Huneker of the Sun (who would soon deem the paintings of The-eight to be "decidedly reactionary"). Huneker praised Kent's brushwork as athletic and his colorful dissonances as daring. In 1910, Kent helped organize the Exhibition of Independent Artists.

A transcendentalist and mystic in the tradition of Thoreau and Emerson, whose works he read, Kent found inspiration in the austerity and stark beauty of wilderness. After Monhegan, he lived for extended periods of time in Winona, Minnesota (1912–1913), Newfoundland (1914–15), Alaska (1918–19), Vermont (1919–1925), Tierra del Fuego (1922–23), Ireland (1926), and Greenland (1929; 1931–32; 1934–35). His series of land and seascapes from these often forbidding locales convey the Symbolist spirit evoking the mysteries and cosmic wonders of the natural world. "I don't want petty self-expression", Kent wrote, "I want the elemental, infinite thing; I want to paint the rhythm of eternity."

In the late summer of 1918, Kent and his nine-year-old son ventured to the American frontier of Alaska. Wilderness (1920), the first of Kent's several adventure memoirs, is an edited and illustrated compilation of his letters home. The New Statesman (London) described Wilderness as "easily the most remarkable book to come out of America since Leaves of Grass was published." Upon the artist's return to New York in March 1919, publishing scion George Palmer Putnam and others, including Juliana Force—assistant to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney—implemented their avant-garde notion of incorporating the artist as "Rockwell Kent, Inc." to support him in his new Vermont homestead while he completed his paintings from Alaska for exhibition in 1920 at Knoedler Galleries in New York. Kent's small oil-on-wood-panel sketches from Alaska—uniformly horizontal studies of light and color—were exhibited at Knoedler's as "Impressions." Their artistic lineage to the small and spare oil sketches of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), which are often entitled "Arrangements," underscores Kent's admiration of Whistler as a "genius."

Approached in 1926 by publisher R. R. Donnelley to produce an illustrated edition of Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast, Kent suggested Moby-Dick instead. Published in 1930 by the Lakeside Press of Chicago, the three-volume limited edition (1000 copies) filled with Kent's haunting black-and-white pen/brush and ink drawings sold out immediately; Random House produced a trade edition which was also immensely popular. A previously obscure book, Moby Dick had been rediscovered by critics in the early 1920s. The success of the Rockwell Kent illustrated edition was a factor in its becoming recognized as the classic it is today.

Less well known are Kent's talents as a jazz age humorist. As the gifted pen-and-ink draftsman "Hogarth, Jr.", Kent created a wealth of whimsical and irreverent drawings published by Vanity Fair, New York Tribune, Harper's Weekly, and the original Life. He brought his Hogarth, Jr., style to a series of richly colored reverse paintings on glass which he completed in 1918 and exhibited at Wanamaker's Department Store. (Two of these glass paintings are in the collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, part of the bequest of modernist collector Ferdinand Howald.) Further decorative work ensued intermittently: in 1939, Vernon Kilns reproduced three series of designs drawn by Kent (Moby Dick, Salamina, Our America) on its sets of contemporary china dinnerware. Among his many contributions between the world wars to the world of publishing, for both an elite and a popular audience, are his pen, brush, and ink drawings that were reproduced on the covers of the upmarket pulp magazine Adventure in 1927.

Raymond Moore, founder and impresario of the Cape Playhouse and Cinema in Dennis, Massachusetts, contracted with Rockwell Kent for the design of murals for the cinema, but the work of transferring and painting the designs on the 6,400-square-foot (590 m2) span was done by Kent's collaborator Jo Mielziner (1901–1976) and a crew of stage set painters from New York City. Ostensibly staying away from the state of Massachusetts to protest the Sacco and Vanzetti executions of 1927, Kent did in fact venture to Dennis in June 1930 to spend three days on the scaffolding, making suggestions and corrections. The signatures of both Kent and Mielziner appear on opposite walls of the cinema.

As World War II approached, Kent shifted his priorities, becoming increasingly active in progressive politics. In 1937, the Section of Painting and Sculpture of the U.S. Treasury commissioned Kent, along with nine other artists, to paint two murals in the New Post Office building at the Federal Triangle in Washington, DC; the two murals are named "Mail Service in the Arctic" and "Mail Service in the Tropics." Kent included (in Inuit dialect and in tiny letters) a polemical statement in the painting, which caused some consternation. In 1939, he joined the Harlem Lodge of the International Workers Order (IWO), an organization devoted to the social and economic welfare of the working public. In 1948 Kent was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1966.

Increasingly supportive of Soviet-American friendship, peace, and a world devoid of nuclear weapons, Kent and his identity as an American painter receded in the postwar years. He became, along with hundreds of other prominent intellectuals and creative artists, a target of those in league with Joseph McCarthy. The rise of abstract expressionism cast a further shadow over such representational painters as Hopper, Bellows, and Kent. In the 1950s, Kent was denied the right to travel abroad by the United States government; the U.S. Supreme Court in Kent v. Dulles affirmed his right to travel by declaring the ban a violation of his civil rights. After an exhibition of his work at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 1957–58, Kent donated several hundred of his paintings and drawings in 1960 to the Soviet peoples. He subsequently became an honorary member of the Soviet Academy of Fine Arts and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967. Kent specified that the prize money be given to the women and children of Vietnam, both North and South. (Fred Lewis's interview with Sally Kent, the artist's wife, in Lewis's 2005 documentary Rockwell Kent, provides clarity to the nature of Kent's intentions.)

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Book formats and corresponding sizes   Name Abbreviations Leaves Pages Approximate cover size (width × height)   inches cm   folio 2º or fo 2 4 12 × 19 30.5 × 48   quarto 4º or 4to 4 8 9½ × 12 24 × 30.5   octavo 8º or 8vo 8 16 6 × 9 15 × 23   duodecimo or twelvemo 12º or 12mo 12 24 5 × 7⅜ 12.5 × 19   sextodecimo or sixteenmo 16º or 16mo 16 32 4 × 6¾ 10 × 17   octodecimo or eighteenmo 18º or 18mo 18 36 4 × 6½ 10 × 16.5   trigesimo-secundo or thirty-twomo 32º or 32mo 32 64 3½ × 5½ 9 × 14   quadragesimo-octavo or forty-eightmo 48º or 48mo 48 96 2½ × 4 6.5 × 10   sexagesimo-quarto or sixty-fourmo 64º or 64mo 64 128 2 × 3 5 × 7.5   

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