If you’re interested in writing in the 19th century, the best place to start is by cutting out a goose quill. The technology wasn’t much further back then, and huge masterpieces of the era were created in a process in which an inkwell, a sheet of paper, a hand and a pen came together. Moby Dick by Herman Melville is one of the most famous of these belts, a book like a whale, as the subtitle says: Moby Dick, the Whale. The story of Bartleby, the scribe, is much shorter. However, it is no less substantial. Many consider it to be Herman Melville’s second major work: Bartleby, the Scrivener.
