This sort of advice would be more useful 200 pages ago… but anyway it’s always good to search for an annotated edition. I read Norton critical edition,* it was really good, had diagrams showing what the different parts of the boat are called, a glossary, supplementary essays, and throughout the text all sorts of footnotes (some of them maybe too explicitly interpretative, but oh well). But I believe even the slightly more modest but still seriously prepared editions such as Oxford World Classics would do the job.
* a critical edition means the editors didn’t just reproduce an existing text, but worked off the most “original” materials available, such as the first edition or the author’s own manuscripts
bluemite@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Here’s a History Channel special about the story that inspired Moby Dick. I’ve never read Moby Dick, but there were things discovered in a journal well after the book came out that are pretty wild.