VERY LIKE A WHALE | 39steppress

In March 2019 we printed Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Well, not the whole thing. Just the phrase 'very like a whale', from a strange section of the novel entitled 'Extracts (supplied by a sub-sub librarian)', which lists pretty much every literary and biblical reference to whales.

The Oxford Centre for the Study of the Book invited over fifty letterpress printers to each tackle a different extract, and we chose the shortest one. Melville culled it from Shakespeare and the context is the oily Polonius eagerly agreeing with Hamlet about the shape of a cloud, even though the cloud is not really like a whale, or a weasel, or a camel, or anything at all except a cloud.

So, we included Hamlet's initial question for good measure, then went to town on the reply. Perhaps it's a kind of word-cloud, or a foaming sea of words. Or maybe a whale. Whichever you choose to see.