Talk:Moby-Dick (1851) US edition

Links
I just went through and fixed the links that were leading to a soft redirect page, only to find that the second half of them are now broken, as someone had gone through and moved the first half of the book to the more appropriately named pages Moby-Dick, but left the second half at Moby_Dick ! I do not know how to move pages, but this should be done rather then going back and changing back the second half of the links to the inappropriately named pages. Russeasby 15:49, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I moved the rest of the pages with WikilinkMoveTable and converted the old pages to soft redirects with Pathosbot. Links to soft redirects will be automatically corrected by TalBot. — {admin} Pathoschild 02:50:03, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks. It'd be a few days yet before I would have enough time to get around to finishing this little project.  :)  —Zhaladshar (Talk) 03:11, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

The Table of Contents ought to show the titles of the chapters. 69.178.122.114 18:18, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Etymology and Extracts
According to, the Etymology and Extracts should be split into different chapters and placed at the beginning of the novel. They are currently in the Epilogue.

Also, the same edition has a Hebrew word for "whale" — "חן" that is not in this edition, nor in the Gutenberg ones. The Bantam Classics edition, as seen in the "Look Inside" feature of Amazon, lists it as "הז" which is visually similar. I cannot confirm the relationship of neither of these words to 'Whale'. --Salty-horse (talk) 17:19, 15 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I checked another modern English edition and it has the word "תר", which, one more, has no relation to 'Whale'. --Salty-horse (talk) 14:06, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

British vs American text
Problems mentioned is the sections above arise from the fact that the British edition, which appeared first, was based on the page proofs of the not-yet-published New York edition. Melville made major and minor changes on those proofs and the British publishers expurgated words and passages they thought racy. The British printer messed things up further, with typos that Melville didn't catch, and, for instance, leaving out the Epilogue, which probably was misplaced when the Extracts were moved from the beginning to the end of the book. There is a discussion of the problems with the text at the Wikipedia article Moby-Dick.

So the best text is that of the Northwestern-Newberry edition, which looked at all these problems and made a text which comes as close as possible to what the author intended, which neither the New York nor the British edition could do. Because the editing was financed by Uncle Sam, the text is not copyright and can be freely reproduced by anyone. CWH (talk) 18:45, 26 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately here, the US federal government work copyright exemption doesn't cover works done on contract or paid for by grants from the US federal government. Only those done by an officer or employee of the government as part of that person's official duties. Got a second best option? Prosody (talk) 00:11, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Sorry for the delay in responding -- I stupidly assumed that my Wikipedia account would notify me of changes here. But one trick to make sure that the editor gets a notice is to use the "ping" format, as in, which produces  to ping me, or , which will ping you. [Oops -- I can't even get this ping thing to work. Maybe you know how?]


 * As to the Northwestern-Newberry text, it is in fact not under copyright and has been reprinted in all the recent paperbacks such as the Penguin or the Northwestern University Press. If you really want to make your head spin, look at the side-by-side comparisons of the British and American texts at Melville Electronic Library! Cheers, CWH (talk) 17:59, 23 September 2014 (UTC)