Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Laureys a Castro, Jan Baptist van der Meiren and Bonaventura Peeters the Elder. The first modern life of Melville, written when he had been out of print for a generation and his masterpiece was remembered, if at all, as a whaling book. Weaver went through the family papers, found the manuscript of Billy Budd in a tin box, and published it. The Melville revival starts here. This edition binds 60 plates of maritime and moonlight painting, among them Turner, Aivazovsky and Winslow Homer, alongside six illustrations restored and coloured.