# “In Moby-Dick, He Swallows Shakespeare…”  ## Metadata - Author: [[Brad Skow]] - Full Title: “In Moby-Dick, He Swallows Shakespeare…” - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Three notes on Moby-Dick - URL: https://mostly.substack.com/p/illustration-revolution-correspondence - Source File: web-only ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > . The question of why one should read a novel when a film version exists has an answer: the film, unlike the book, has to show how the characters look, and that can make a story worse—not because the actor doesn’t match every readers’ vision of a certain character, but because the story draws its power partly from the character being unvisualized, even unvisualizable. If any character is like that, it is Captain Ahab ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0fs34g0t9xvhq5t7xvfesp2)) > The most famous illustrated edition of *Moby-Dick—*Lakeside Press, 1930—illustrates the point. No matter how powerful Rockwell Kent’s Ahab, too much is lost giving him any definite visual character at all. The larger-than-life becomes merely life-sized ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0fs3cc0rgdmgve2drpfts34))