Beschreibung:

Property from the Workman Collection
Melville, HermanMoby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851
12mo. Six pages of publisher's advertisements including author’s other works at end; the book remarkably almost entirely free from foxing. Publisher’s binding of purple-brown cloth, spine gilt-lettered, boards stamped with central publisher's device, clay coated endpapers, gilt generally bright, hinges sound; bottom extremities and edges a little shelfworn, and cloth with closed split starting at top of lower joint, but in all a much superior copy than usually seen and mercifully free from restoration. In morocco folding case. 
The first American edition of Melville's greatest achievement, this edition contains 35 passages and the "Epilogue" not present in the English first edition. It sold poorly and copies remained with the publisher. In 1853 a major fire destroyed the Harper & Brothers warehouse and with it some 297 remaining copies of this volume; few, perhaps no more than 60, survived.
Moby-Dick vanished in Melville’s own lifetime, and resurfaced in the 1920s, when it was reappraised and subsequently regarded as a stunning work of Modernism before the movement was invented. Subversive, prophetic, and lyrical in equal measure, Ishmael’s voice serves as the embodiment of human endurance, and the desire to discover all that lies beyond the horizon.
REFERENCE:BAL 13664; Grolier, American 60; Sadleir, Excursions 229