SALEM — English author Philip Hoare won the Samuel Johnson Prize last year for his book "Leviathan, or The Whale." His new book is "The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Deep" (Ecco Books, 2010, $27.99), and he will give a reading from it tonight at 7 at Cornerstone Books in Salem.

He spoke with The Salem News recently about his books and his fascination with whales.

How did you become interested in whales?

My whole awareness really boils down to the start of the first "love the whale" campaign, which included Roger Payne's recording of "The Song of the Humpback Whale." I heard that in the early '70s.

The first whale I ever saw was a killer whale in a tank in the Windsor Safari Park. It was really very thrilling for a young boy. But its dorsal fin had flopped over and become detumescent; that was a symbol of its state. I went home and painted it in my journal. I found that journal again recently.

So that's a very public and a very personal experience. It seems like your book is always reconciling, or steering between these two elements.

In the same way that (Herman) Melville tries to come to terms with his physical experience of the whale, trying to fill in the gaps. Through the whole of "Moby-Dick," he calls the whale a fish. He knows it's not a fish; he's playing with these ideas. And I'm playing with our conceptions of what whales are, what whales represent to us, the perceived notions. I'm demythologizing those. The whale as both a new age symbol and a source of ecological fret.

Are you critical of the way we attribute qualities to whales?

I take all these things on, and I give them credence. "Charismatic megafauna" — biologists use that term deploringly of Joe Public who gets carried away with big game and whales instead of, say, microbes, something more authentically "scientific," implying that we're imbeciles for falling for these whales.

I've been accused of anthropomorphizing whales. But that's the only way to talk about these things. We can't know what a sperm whale does with that large brain; we have to imagine it. Even the terms we have for them, "sperm" and "right" whales, we're trying to put it in terms of its usefulness to us. The whale is such a carrier of our anxiety. And I want to go beyond that — above and beyond that.

There's been this enormous change in our attitude. In our lifetime, we probably ate whales in margarine; our mothers may have used whale oil in their makeup. We've gone from whale hunters to whale watchers. Such a short time that change has taken.

You've written biographies of literary figures and books of cultural history. How was writing "The Whale" different?

My earlier books had been about dead people, but this was a living subject. This is an ongoing story. Normally when I finish a book, that's almost when you say goodbye to the subject. But with this it's just starting, it's ongoing.

For instance, this summer I met Hal Whitehead, a pre-eminent whale biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Only now is he developing a theory that sperm whale calves might suckle through their noses. These animals have been around 50 million years, and we still don't know how they feed. I look at him as a kind of astronaut, discovering these things. Such as, sperm whales use different dialects. One social group, within 20 miles of another, has a different dialect. It just strikes me we don't really want to know what they're saying. I don't think I want to be around when we translate whale speak.

Because of the terrible things they'd have to say about us?

Yes, exactly.

Herman Melville is so important, almost a guide for you. The first half of your book visits all the places where he lived, and you go to his grave in the Bronx. Did you choose that itinerary as a way to organize your book, or had you already visited all those places?

For anyone who hasn't read "Moby-Dick," my book is almost a way of saying, "Go and read the book." I find Melville's life interesting, but what I wrote is also a biography of the whale. The structure of the book is pretty organic. I was just gathering this stuff. I was doing it to my own satisfaction, and it came together.

I tried to read "Moby-Dick" a couple of times and never got through it. Then I started coming to New England. My excitement at discerning the history of New England is in there. It's a very fluid kind of history — very specifically, Provincetown used to be the fourth biggest whaling port, now it's the biggest whale-watching port. History is not a dead subject.

There's a section on sea-serpent sightings in Gloucester. What were those about?

There's a real eruption of sea-serpent sightings in the area from 1819 to 1821. Daniel Webster saw one off Cape Ann. I can't disavow the stories — you can't. But what were they seeing? They knew what a whale looked like, what a pilot whale looked like, but these things were a hundred feet long and had manes. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people saw them. I've always been interested in cryptozoology. When I was young, I was interested in the Loch Ness monster. Jung has some wonderful theories about these things, about why people see things like spaceships. I just like to present the stuff to people.

You describe a period when whale ships were going farther abroad in search of prey, because the whales were thinning out. And it's then that all these stories were told, which Melville gathered, like the story of the Essex — of whales attacking ships. It's almost as if they were taking revenge on the whalers.

I don't know whether it's technically revenge, because they were not actually becoming aware and taking some kind of group action. I don't know what that was. But there is a point that the sperm whale population in the Atlantic starts attacking boats. Hal Whiteside said he thought that whole Essex thing was just, the ship itself was falling apart, the whale ran into it by mistake, and they made up the story as an insurance scam.

How did the Quakers come to be so pivotal in the development of the industry?

It really comes down to, they went to Nantucket because they were being persecuted in Boston in the mid-17th century. It was happenstance that they happened to be there as the industry grew. They see the whales as God's bounty. They didn't see any discrepancy between their faith, their pacifist nature and the bloody business of whaling. Also, they couldn't take part in the professions, like law, because they couldn't swear oaths.

Are you obsessed with any other animals?

I'm into birds, but it's not like whales. There's nothing else like whales that has that culture around them.

A lot of your photos of whales are in the book. How many whale-watching cruises have you been on?

I couldn't even number them. I get on the boat all day. They have to throw me off at the end of the day. I've been doing this for 10 years.

If you go

What: Author's reading by Philip Hoare from "The Whale: In Search of the Giants of The Deep"

When: Tonight at 7

Where: Cornerstone Books, 45 Lafayette St., Salem

Admission: Free

More information: 978-744-1831