Moby Dick; or, The White Whale (Photoplay Title: The Sea Beast) [Photoplay Edition]

New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Very Good+ in Good dj. [1926] (c.1925). First Edition Thus. Hardcover. [a good sound copy, minor wear to corners, slight fading to cloth at spine extremities matching paper loss to jacket; the jacket is age-toned and modeately surface-worn, with a number of small edge-chips, deterioration (insect-damage?) along both flap-folds, etc.] (8 B&W film stills) Tie-in with the 1926 Warner Bros. silent film, the first screen version of the Melville classic (re-titled THE SEA BEAST). The movie starred John Barrymore as a decidedly romanticized Captain Ahab, and messed about quite a bit with the novel's plot -- adding a love triangle, for instance, featuring Ahab, an invented half-brother, and a minister's daughter (the latter played by Barrymore's lover and wife-to-be Dolores Costello) -- although Grosset & Dunlap at least had the good sense to just publish the full text of the Melville book (all CXXXV chapters of it, plus Epilogue, 511 pages in all), instead of "novelizing" the film. (Maybe it was cheaper than hiring someone to concoct a version that conformed to the movie.) An interesting element of this edition is a three-page introduction, an "Appreciation" of the book-to-film translation, in which S.R. Buchman (presumably screenwriter Sidney Buchman, although he doesn't appear to have had anything to do with the film) writes with an apparently straight face that "every important element has been transcribed with absolute sincerity, and is a clear reflection of the spirit originally infused into the work by Melville." (Who of course was conveniently long-dead, and probably didn't even have an agent.) NOTE that the film was remade as a talkie in 1930 -- this time using the book's original title, again with Barrymore and the love-triangle element, and with a young Joan Bennett replacing Dolores Costello. (That picture occasioned the release of a separate Photoplay Edition, so just to be clear: THIS book is the tie-in with the 1926 silent version.) . (Inventory #: 30095)