SMU English professor co-creates card game based on literary classic

Tim Cassedy, an assistant professor of English at SMU, co-created a card game based on the classic novel by Herman Melville.

By Ron Charles
Editor of Book World

Dick by Tim CassedyRereading passages of “Moby-Dick,” I have no idea how my old English teacher once kept 20 hormonal teenagers from staging a mutiny of bawdy wisecracks. It helped, I suppose, that ours was a very conservative Christian prep school. If any of us was tempted to see risque puns lurking in Melville’s classic novel, we knew to pray rather than titter.

Times have changed.

Oct. 18 marks the 164th birthday of “Moby-Dick,” and if you’re looking for the perfect gift for a literary nerd with a ribald sense of humor, ahoy — thar she blows: An English professor and a couple of his former students have produced a card game based on “Moby-Dick” called simply “Dick.”

For $19.75, you get a box of 400 white cards containing short phrases from Melville’s novel. Each player starts with 12.

Read the full story.