“Call me Ishmael.”

The opening line of Herman Melville‘s novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is probably the most memorable and most recognized opening line of any novel in the history of literature – at least if you want to believe the editors of  American Book Review. Published in 1851, the eponymous title character soon became what arguably was the most famous whale in the world for a good 150 years.

Until Twitter came along.

The Internet hasn’t only changed the way we do things, it has also changed the things we do. People don’t read as many books as they used to 150 years, 50 years, or even 15 years ago. If you were to ask people who they thought the most famous whale in the world was today, chances are that many of them would probably pick the notorious Twitter fail whale over Moby-Dick, although the owners of Twitter probably won’t be too happy about how famous their whale has become, as it only surfaces when their servers are overloaded.

Inspired by both Moby-Dick and Twitter we have come up with a design that bridges the gap between 19th century art and literature and 21st century pop culture and technology. The name of our design is Call me @ishmael.

The design is available on T-shirts, mugs and bags from these retailers:

• Zazzle: (US) (CA) (AU) (BR) (JP) (UK) (FR) (ES) (NL) (SE) (DE)
  
• Cafepress: (US) (CA) (UK) (FR) (DE) 
• Spreadshirt: (US) (EU)
• Wordans: (North America)