I bound the three-volume London (1851) first edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for a bookseller. I felt that part of the value was in preserving the format of three small unpretentious books, especially since Herman Melville was very much aware of how books were categorized by size: he used book sizes (folio, octavo, duodecimo) to classify the whales in the novel. 

As inspiration for the three bindings, I found: a mid-nineteenth-century map of the South Pacific where Ahab sought Moby-Dick; an astrological map for the night when the whaler left Nantucket; and a favorite wave from one of Winslow Homer’s whaling pictures. The three volumes ended up in their own little sea chest.