SALEM — “Moby-Dick” has the most famous opening sentence in American literature: “Call me Ishmael.” That’s it, but what a lot gets packed into those three words.
One’s a verb, one a pronoun, one an unfamiliar-looking proper name (though familiar enough if you know your Old Testament). Not wasting any time, the sentence introduces the narrator straightaway; and, since it’s an imperative, it addresses readers directly, drawing them in immediately. If that’s not enough, the beginning of the sentence is a near-rhyme with its conclusion: all/el. Additionally, there’s that play of l’s and m’s. Not bad for just five syllables.
Now that sentence can make a further claim. It has inspired the name of “Draw Me Ishmael: The Book Arts of Moby Dick,” which runs at the Peabody Essex Museum through Jan. 4, 2026. Curated by Dan Lipcan, director of PEM’s Phillips Library, the show is lively, varied, imaginative, playful, and, for lack of a better word, loving. The love in question is for Herman Melville’s quite-staggering creation and the quite-delightful inventiveness that that creation has inspired in artists, designers, and other authors.
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Before going further, the matter of a certain hyphen needs to be addressed. The title Melville gave his book is “Moby-Dick; or The Whale.” Admittedly, that hyphenation looks a bit odd, even fussy. So it’s often rendered as “Moby Dick.” Many of the editions in the show forgo the hyphen, as does the title of the show itself. Hence the occasional discrepancy in titular spelling found in this review. Don’t blame Globe proofreading!
A wall text notes that “Moby-Dick” is “the most persistently pictured of all American novels.” There have been more than 100 illustrated editions in English and another 30 in foreign languages. This makes sense, so visually profuse is Melville’s story of the whaling ship Pequod, its demonic captain, Ahab (speaking of Old Testament names), and his ferocious pursuit of the Great White Whale.
There have also been all sorts of “Moby-Dick”-adjacent titles, of which the show includes several, and all sorts of formats, among them comic books, pop-up books, artist’s books, graphic novels, and even “Emoji Dick,” which renders Melville’s text as just what the title says: emojis.
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That’s a pretty wild idea, but no more so than Ricardo Bloch’s “Huckleberry Dick,” which is attributed to an author named “Samuel Melville” (alternately known as “Herman Clemens”?). Bloch took the Classics Illustrated comics of “Moby-Dick” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” — both involve voyages on water, after all — and lit out with them for the literary territory, interweaving the two into a single, head-spinning comic.
On display at PEM are nearly 30 editions of the novel. They include a copy of the first, from 1851. The most startling cover belongs to an edition designed by Chaim and Susan Ebanks. With its white, wrinkled-looking leather surface, the book imitates the skin of the title character; and a glass prosthetic eye peers out from the cover. Startling in a different way is a four-volume miniature edition of the book, published in Germany in 2022. Each volume is 1½ inches wide and slightly more than 2 inches high. Forget about the whiteness of the whale. Here it’s the wee-ness that gets you.
The show also includes logbooks from two Nantucket whaling ships, the Potomac and Acushnet. Melville served on the latter for 18 months, before jumping ship. There’s also a copy of Owen Chase’s “Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex,” from 1821. Melville drew on it in writing “Moby-Dick.”
Among illustrators of “Moby-Dick” featured here are some you might expect. Rockwell Kent, the artist most associated with the novel, executed 280 drawings for the 1930 Lakeside Press edition. Barry Moser’s celebrated 1979 Arion Press edition includes 100 boxwood engravings.
There are also illustrators whose presence is a surprise. As an art student at Cooper Union, Alex Katz did 27 “Moby-Dick” drawings. That was a long time ago. Katz, bless him, turns 97 next month. LeRoy Neiman, that master of kitschy machismo — macho kitsch, too — illustrated a 1975 limited edition with a foreword by none other than Jacques-Yves Cousteau.
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The show is in two galleries. In the smaller room is a digital interactive display that offers images and text from many of the books. There’s also a rudimentary whaleboat, with the thwarts serving as benches for museumgoers. That’s a nifty touch.
Finally, it’s not just the visual element of “Draw Me Ishmael” that deserves praise. Playing in that other gallery is a “Moby-Dick” audiobook, read by Anthony Heald: 135 chapters (and epilogue), clocking in at 9 minutes less than 24 hours. It’s an ideal aural accompaniment for the rest of the show.
On July 21, from 1-3 p.m. PEM will host “Illustrating Moby Dick,” with visitors asked to choose a page from the novel and illustrate it. Participants will receive a copy of David Rodriguez and Ignacio Segesso’s graphic novel adaptation of Melville’s novel.
DRAW ME ISHMAEL: The Book Arts of Moby Dick
At Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, 161 Essex St., Salem, through Jan. 4, 2026. pem.org, 978-745-9500
Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].