When my son Douglas was very young, one of our bonding rituals was reading. He learned to read at an early age but always enjoyed curling up next to me or having me read to him by the side of the bed as he gazed toward the ceiling in rapt attention. When he was about 10, we decided to tackle Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Admittedly, we were going along fine with Captain Ahab and his quixotic quest for the great whale but got stuck when Melville threw in detailed descriptions of whale biology. What enhanced our reading sessions was the book itself, an old, thick, volume printed in 1930 by Random House. The pages are a vintage cream hue and filled with deep ebony-colored illustrations by Rockwell Kent. They look like etchings or block prints. They appear often enough throughout the elegant text—Monotype Fournier—to add some visual context to the …