I start reading Moby-Dick last month, and it doesn’t take too many pages for it to sink in that Mr. H. Melville is 100% out of his mind. Either that or he is supernaturally skilled at writing in the voice of what sounds like a coked-up mutant Shakespeare newly landed from Neptune. I am all over it. I finish the book this week and the damn thing is probably my new favorite dead-author novel. How predictable.

The impression I have of Melville as a lunatic genius is only partly a result of the novel’s strange and rapturous writing. A large part of the impression, it must be said, is thanks to Barry Moser’s scary engraving of Melville on the title page of my edition.

This picture gets creepier the more I look at it. Melville’s face here is the stuff of nightmares. He looks taxidermied. Look at that thousand-yard stare. The unearthly lowered eyelids. The corpselike shading-lines on his skin. As stony an authorial edifice as you could ask for. Even his beard is stony. This is not the usual nineteenth-century formal solemnity of a gentleman sitting for a portrait; Melville seems not merely stony but sick, as if suppressing profound spiritual or intestinal displeasure, or adjusting to having been recently extracted from a glacier, or tuning out for a few hours to hearken to the latest eruption of voices in the Melvillian upstairs. I keep flipping back to look at this engraving as I read. Whether or not it’s an accurate likeness, just imagining this ghoulish face as the mind behind the bizarre poetry of Moby-Dick makes the book seem not so much a monumental work of inspired literary brilliance and more like graphomaniacal Outsider Art. (Which I wouldn’t mind.)

What’s worse: After a while, the engraving’s brushstroke-like forms of Melville’s uncompleted shoulder-slopes start to look to me like tiny handless arms, and the downward-pointing curve of his lower lapels becomes a little tapering genie body floating upward against a white background. Do you see it? Melville, caricatured as a tuxedoed inky-black ghost with flippers? Perhaps even a human-headed whale, sans tail flukes? Ahab: Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?