The Library of Congress [3] Tuesday inducted [4] a new version of the classic tome Moby Dick into its archives. The twist? This version is written entirely in emoji, or Japanese emoticons [5].

Emoji Dick [6] began in 2009 as a Kickstarter [7] project [8] by creator Fred Benenson (a Kickstarter employee himself). Benenson took to Amazon [9]'s Mechanical Turk [10] to crowdsource a translation of the Herman Melville epic, which is upwards of 212,000 words.

Emoji Dick is now the first book penned in emoji to reside in the Library of Congress catalog [11].

[Image: Flickr user cimere [12]]