Moby-Dick Hits New York Shelves

On November 14, 1851, the New York publishing house Harper & Brothers released the first American edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, a single volume priced at $1.50. A British edition called The Whale had already come out in London a few weeks earlier under a different publisher. The novel opened with one of literature's most famous lines, "Call me Ishmael," and then went almost nowhere. It sold about 2,300 copies in its first year and a half, and after that New Yorkers bought it at a rate of roughly 27 copies a year for the next 34 years. Melville died in 1891 with the book out of print and his own name mostly forgotten by the city that published him.