LOS ANGELES—Cover author Gerald Putty told reporters Monday that he is about six months away from finishing a word-for-word rewrite of Herman Melville's masterpiece Moby-Dick, saying that his version will be "utterly true in every way" to the original. "When you cover a novel like this, you're tempted to play with all kinds of things—sentence structure, meter, all the commas," said Putty, adding that fans of the original will be pleased that he retained the same chapter numbers and titles. "I might alter the font a little, but other than that, this book will be a pretty faithful cover." Putty confessed that he has run into a few problems because his spelling is not as good as Melville's, but said he felt no shame falling short of one of the greatest writers of all time.