But the first printings of Moby-Dick didn't have the Epilogue. The first editions of that most classic of classics were incomplete. This is the story of how one of the leading contenders for The Great American Novel—"the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer," "arguably the greatest single work in American literature"—started life as a critical mockery. It is the story of what can happen when literature, as an artifact, is what it has to be: mediated both by technology and by extremely fallible humans.

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It started with copyright laws. In the mid-19th century, international copyright didn't yet exist. The British had their copyright; their former subjects had printing presses that would happily replicate British newspapers and novels. (The result of this discrepancy was delightfully Darwinian: American printers would "haunt the docks," awaiting the latest proofs from the United Kingdom so they could rush them to print before their competitors.)

By the 1840s, American authors had figured out a way to doubly exploit this state of affairs: If they published their works in Britain first, they realized, they could benefit—in Britain, at least—from the protection of British copyright laws. And then, if they could arrange for the same work to be printed in America at almost the same time as the British version was released, they could avoid the costly irony of having their work pirated in their own country.

Melville, for his first five novels, used that scheme fairly successfully. His books were printed in Britain; less than six weeks later, the American editions appeared. Which was a legal hack that benefited the author, the printer, and the public fairly nicely.

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale—Melville's sixth novel—would have a similar bicontinental birth. On October 18, 1851, the London printer Richard Bentley published the book under the relatively un-evocative title of The Whale. Bentley created 500 editions that emphasized the aesthetics of the book: The Whale, as the Library of America describes it, featured a cloth cover and a cloth spine, both appropriately sea-blue in color. That binding was "emblazoned in gold from top to bottom with diving right whales."

Moby-Dick, of course, is a sperm whale. Which might have been the first indication that things were going awry.

The book's first edition, however, had more substantial problems than its cover. This was Victorian England; publishers regularly—and heavily—edited the manuscripts they were printing to remove content they deemed vulgar and/or "politically suspect." They would generally make these changes, moreover, without authorial approval. And even if they tried to confer with the author, the attempt would slow up the printing process when the author was an ocean away. Two days after he sent his novel's final proofs to Bentley, Melville decided to dedicate the book to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. The author informed Bentley of this, along with his last-minute decision to change the novel's title from The Whale to Moby-Dick. By the time he received the update, Bentley was able to insert the dedication into the book; he was not able, however, to change the book's title. The Whale would remain unnamed.