Artist and librarian, Matt Kish, expanded the concept of ornamentation. As its title suggests, Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing For Every Page, involved the artist drawing pictures on top of each page of his prized edition of Melville’s novel. Some of the pictures are intended as illustrations, others are stylized and evoke what the novel made him feel. You can get a sense of the finished product in this video produced by his publisher.

His comments, in an interview with PBS’s Art Beat, give us additional ways of thinking about how the act of ornamentation might encourage new forms of close reading and may work hand-in-hand with an immersive understanding of the novel.

For example, Kish describes his life-long engagement with Moby-Dick:

What's really fascinating to me about the book is that it seems to be a different novel every time I experience it. My first experience with it was as a very young child - probably 5 or 6 years old and seeing the movie on television. And like a lot of young boys, I was kind of obsessed with monster movies. And just seeing that white whale - I have this very vivid image of this eye rolling under the water. So that struck me immediately as a child because here was a monster that was almost real. So, that crossing over, that blurry line between fantasy and reality hooked me right away.

Very shortly after that, either my parents or my grandparents gave me this very tiny abridged version. It had a page of text on the left and an illustration on the right. So every other page has some sort of drawing. And obviously this version was heavily abridged. But that was the first time I'd gotten to know the characters: Captain Ahab and Ishmael and so on. I was 6 or 7 years old and I was smitten. So I knew the story from a very early age.

My first attempt to read the unabridged novel was in high school. And, of course, when you're a high school reader, you miss a great deal, but there was enough there that appealed to my immature sense of symbolism and grasping for meaning. What does the world mean and all these questions that a teenager struggles with. And so the book showed a lot. It felt like everything you needed to know in life was in the pages of this book. Then I read it in college and I read it as an adult several times. Every time I come to the book, I see parallels to stages that I've gone through in life and more and more is revealed to me. It's seemingly endless.”

Kish notes the ways he focused on different elements (monsters, characters, symbols) in the novel at different moments in his life. He also describes the ways his relationship to the story shifted in the course of producing his illustrations:

At the beginning of the project I identified more with Ishmael because throughout so much of the novel, he becomes not more than a passive observer. He's narrating the tale. He's recounting everything that happened. But Ishmael himself is not really a factor. And since I have read this story so many times, it's a novel that I've witnessed but never really felt like a participant. The life of a whaler in the 1800s is of course very far from the life of a librarian in Ohio in the 21st Century. So I identified a lot with Ishmael because his are the eyes through which the tale unfolds. And in creating all of these illustrations, I was functioning in that same role.

As time went on though, and the project began to take its toll, there were times when it was very difficult. Especially near the end, I had gotten so deeply into the project and felt that I had already sacrificed so much - personal time, time with my wife, so much just to keep this project going. I did, as cliché as it may sound, begin to identify with Ahab because finishing the project became an absolute obsession to me. Ahab's entire obsession within the novel is to kill this whale, which has wronged him and taken his leg and unmanned him. And near the end it became a burning obsession of mine to simply finish, to get to the end, so that I could put it away and I could have my life back.

Kish, like Eckert and Pitts-Wiley, sought to translate his fascination with Melville’s texts into a new creative work. He sought to share with the world why he found this novel so compelling and interesting. The process of illustrating Moby-Dick changed his relationship to the story and its characters, opening him (and his readers) to new insights.

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