Why One Artist Transcribed All 900-Plus Pages of ‘Moby-Dick’ by Hand

For four months, beginning in the summer of 2024, the Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins woke up every day before dawn, brewed coffee and sat down at her dining table to copy out Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” (1851) with a nib pen. Writing in midnight blue acidic ink on onionskin paper, she made her way through the book’s 900-plus pages 10 at a time. The resulting work, “Or, the Whale, Vol. I-III,” is housed in three black clothbound binders. “It felt ritualistic,” says Collins, 41, of the project, “like meditation.”

Collins, who grew up in Montgomery, Ala., and was raised in both evangelical and Presbyterian churches, was drawn to the novel in part because it has been described as “America’s Bible.” Her daily scrivening practice was inspired by the American conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg, who in 1974 copied Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891) across 20 6-by-6-foot canvases in longhand using a Pentel marker. “Ruppersberg talks about transcription as the most intimate you can become with an author,” says Collins. “I’m enamored with that idea.”