from Karl LaRocca's Moby-Dick Compressed -- "An erasure of Moby-Dick removing every instance of a word following its initial appearance in the novel" in Issue 5 of The Agriculture Reader, here. "Larocca wrote a computer program that spat out the first words of every sentence in the novel, then he jammed on from there," they explain over at Electric Literature, here.

P.S. -- if you'd rather drink your books, you might try Rogue Brewery's White Whale Ale, infused with pages from Melville's novel.

1) Justin Quinn's "Moby Dick Chapter 55 or 9200 times E" (2004), here. More here.


2) Linda Carreiro's "The Fossil Whale." She explains, "Within the contemporary context the transplanted versions are necessarily changed from their original meaning, unable to be read in the same way as the context in which they were created," here. More images here. Also see her "Passage" (2010), here.

3) Keith Smith's tunnel book, "The Prism of Textual Planes and the Thread of Memory" (2009), here.

page 23 of Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow (Tin House Books, 2006), here. Some discussion here, here, here. Smith explains, I tried to illustrate the passages as literally as possible--if the book says there was a green Spitfire, I drew a green Spitfire." Smith's website (with images), here.

and: page 197 from Matt Kish's One Drawing for Every Page of Moby Dick. Coming soon from Tin House, here. His blog here and more images here. A short review here. Plus, Oprah likes it!

Indulgence Press's Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville (1995). "Suzanne Moore created original hand lettering of Bartleby’s classic “I would prefer not to” statement in the period style of a 19th century legal script used to illustrate Bartelby's mental state. The lettering first appears fully legible and grows until it literally falls off the bottom of the final page." More here.