Moby Dick, our third most popular title, is now available in an edition via our new production process. Enjoy!

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“Throughout human history, people who took to the sea in Britain, on the Continent or in North America, did so usually because there was no other way of life open to them.” - Basil Greenhill, The Life and Death of the Merchant Sailing Ship, 1815-1895, 1980.
 ”The creditors sued, as they will . . . In [...]

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Genius though he was, Melville didn’t make up Moby Dick. Rather, the real-life sinking of Nantucket’s Essex by a whale inspired him. Philbrick recently wrote about the Essex, but Essex first mate Owen Chase’s short but powerful first hand-account is now available on Ria Press. Most incredible is Chase’s matter-of-fact nature in dealing with the sinking [...]

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Melville, and especially his masterwork Moby Dick, can induce eyeball-rolling in students, imagining an unreadable and unfathomably long homework assignment. But if you haven’t read him since high school, please read him again, maybe even aloud.
I recently re-read Moby Dick as a way to put my infant daughter to sleep at night. She just needed to hear someone’s voice, and Shel [...]

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