Moby-Dick is Melville's whaling world drawn as a hydrographic chart: bone-white paper stretched taut, and every mark on it a line. Hairline harpoon rules shoot across columns, compass roses radiate from corners, and figures are cut in the tight cross-hatched engraving of a sailor scratching a sperm whale onto ivory during a dead calm. There are almost no fills and almost no color — the drama lives in the density of the linework and the vast white swells of empty ground between. One thin black line pulls you toward the whale.