All Astir

"Extract 25. 'The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming in them.' Fuller's Profane and Holy State." Brittany Starr and Mallory N. Haselberger, BookLab at University of Maryland. Mixed media (collage and letterpress). Printed on a Line-O-Scribe, Model 1411 on Strathmore printmaking paper using rubber and oil-based ink; includes Jenson, News Gothic, and Bookman typefaces with Hamilton wood type. Image courtesy of Bodleian Libraries.

Melville continues to evoke wonderful artistic responses. Alexandra Franklin writes from the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford:

As part of the 2019 commemorations, the Bodleian Library in Oxford assembled a collaborative edition of most of the "Extracts. Supplied by a sub-sublibrarian," from about 80 printers worldwide. The idea derives from the print exchange, the custom of printers sharing samples, a kind of "gam" of the printing community. The exercise stimulated work undertaken at the Bodleian's Bibliographical Press, a letterpress workshop stocked with handoperated iron presses and type and used for teaching to university students and the public, in the Old Bodleian Library. Joining a similarly acquired collection of Shakespeare's "Sonnets" made in 2016, the Moby-Dick "Extracts" from 2019, now housed in the Bodleian Library at shelfmark Rec.a.54, present a cross-section of modern letterpress printing, variegated in design, materials, and language. Some express contemporary concerns for the preservation of the oceans and acknowledgement of the racism shown in whalers' accounts of Pacific islanders; the collection itself was brought up to date with quotations from Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us (1951) and from marine ecologist Mark P. Simmonds. More information, and images of the printed "Extracts," can be found at <www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/csb/bibpress>.

Franklin notes, in reference to the image of Extract 25 included above, "Extract 25 was made by students Brittany Starr and Mallory Haselberger, at BookLab at University of Maryland (another university-based letterpress workshop). They have elegantly and appropriately inverted the run of the text to place 'oil' above 'water' and also pointed towards contemporary concerns about another kind of oil." The Bodleian "Extracts" are especially enticing because of the inventiveness of the printers. Another effort to systematically portray all the "Extracts" is Matt Kish's "Extracts" project: <www.matt-kish.com/mobydick-extracts/2016/4/8/extracts-01>. Together these two efforts are exuberant, creative, and edgy.

Aileen Callahan was chosen as the 2020 Melville Society Archive artist. As Robert K. Wallace noted in "Art in the Melville Society Archive," the Melville Society Cultural Project budgeted "$500 a year for the acquisition of original works by living artists" beginning in 2008 (Leviathan 22.1 [March 2020]: 56). Callahan has painted a series of watercolors, "Moby Dick in Days of Pestilence and Chaos II," that present images of plague close-up and washing over and inside Moby Dick. "Watercolor conveys glazes of color in shades of light/dark," she writes, "to establish the feeling of the sea, Moby Dick's surfaces, with fluid backgrounds 'holding' the enigma of the contagious fluid image. Watercolor's motion gesture heightens a continuum of textures, dissolving shape edges, and

"Contagion XXVII" in "Moby Dick in Days of Pestilence and Chaos II" series. Aileen Callahan. Image courtesy of Aileen Callahan.

connects multiple views which can 'spread.'" The series now includes at least 45 watercolors.

The bold artwork by married artists Timothy Sparvero and Andrea Montano for Arrowhead, Damian Wampler's graphic-novel adaptation of Moby-Dick, is meant to "take you out of this world" in order to engage young people with Melville's work. Wampler writes that his philosophy is "Don't be boring!" Aunt Charity, for example, is drawn as young, tough, dressed in high-heel boots and a form-fitting red spacesuit, and aiming a laser gun. The cover of Arrowhead appeared in the last issue of Leviathan (23.1 [March 2021]: 142). The graphic novel is still in production; Sparvero and Montano will complete the artwork for volume one in the next few...