Whitman, Walt

Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, New York: [for the author by Andrew Rome], 1855

Small folio (280 x 197 mm). Engraved frontispiece portrait of Whitman by Samuel Hollyer after a photograph, printed on th🅘ick paper and retaining original tissue-guard; occasional very light and typical browning to text, a few unobtrusive marginal dampspots to first few leaves, a few neat penciled reader's marks, with longer, early penciled comment at top margin of first page of text and a penciled transcription of Whitman's later poem "To the Man-of-War-Bird" on blank portion of final leaf. Publisher's dark green coarse-ribbed cloth, the covers with blind-stamped floral decorations and central title gilt-lettered in ornamental "rustic" font, all within a gilt triple-fillet frame, smooth spine gilt with title and floral ornaments, marbled endpapers, ෴gilt edges (Myerson's binding A); corners just rubbed, head and foot of spine restored, inner hinges tightened. Half green morocco folding-case; extremities rubbed.

A second, very fine copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass; first issue of the text, before the insertion of eight pages of press notices; first issue of the binding; second state of the copyright page (as in all but two recorded copies) and of p. iv, ♍col. 2, l. 4 ("cities adn" corre🌌cted to "cities and").

Leaves of Grass "is America's second Declaration of Independence: that of 1776 was political, this of 1855 intellectual" (Printing and the Mind of Man). One of the mo✃st attractive, if fragile, books in American ﷽literature, Whitman's self-published poetical manifesto was partially type-set by the author.

This copy bears the Boston ticket of the distributors of the first edition, Fowlers, Wells and Co., publishers of "Books on Phrenology, Physiology, Water Cure, Phonography, Psychology and kindred subjects"; Whitman was acquainted with the firm's publications, and in July 1849 Lorenzo Fowler had made a phrenological chart of Whitman’s skull. Distribution of Leaves of Grass fell to the phrenology firm after a bookseller on Nassau Street, to whom Whitman first consigned the edition, "evidently found it offensive and ordered its removal the very next day" (Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman, p. 79). In addition to the Manhattan and Boston shops of Fowlers, Wells, Leaves of Grass was also sold at Swayne’s Book Shop on Fulton Street, Brooklyn, and the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston. In his 1995 biography, Walt Whitman’s America, David S. 🌞Reynolds postulates that the poet exemplified his distributer’s views on sex and the body.

Despite the seeming limitations of its distribution, the first edition was soon exhausted. Between June 1855 and January 1856 the entire print run, which Whitman estimated at 800 copies, was bound in five tranches of increasingly modest bindings and dispersed either by sale or presentation by the author. Leaves of Grass was also reviewed widely—and not just by Whitman himself. A number of early readers, wh🍌ether consciously or not, seemed to recognize and accept the proclamation made by the author towards the end of the first, long poem that would subsequently be titled "Song of Myself": "Do I contradict myself? | Very well then . . . . I contradict myself; | I am large . . . . I contain multitudes."

Among the multitudes that the cultural critic Charles Eliot Norton saw in the poet, according to his review of Leaves of Grass for the September 1855 issue of Putnam’s Monthly, was "a compound of the New England transcendentalist and New York rowdy," while the volume of verse itself he summarized as “this gross yet elevated, this superficial yet profound, this preposterous yet somehow fascinating book." Norton concludes his essay, "As seems very proper in a book of transcendental poetry, the author withholds his name from the title page, and presents his portrait, neatly engraved on steel, instead. This, no doubt, is upon the principle that the name is merely accidental; while the portrait affords an idea of the essential being from whom these utterances proceed. We must add, however, that this significant reticence does not prevail throughout the volume, for we learn on p. 29, that our poet is 'Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.' That he was an American, we knew before, for, aside from America, there is no quarter of the universe where such a production could have had a genesis. That he was one of the roughs was also tolerably plain; but that he was a kosmos, is a piece of news we were hardly prepared for. Precisely what a kosmoꩵs is, we trust Mr. Whitman will take an earౠly occasion to inform the impatient public" (emphasis added).

REFERENCE:

Myerson A2.1.a₁; BAL 21395; Printing and the Mind of Man 340; Grolier, American 67; Feinberg/Detroit 269; William White, "The First (1855) 'Leaves of Grass': How Many Copies?," in PBSA (1957) 57:352–54; cf. Ed Folsom, Whitman Making Books, Books Making Whitman (The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa, 2005); "Afterword," in Leaves of Grass: 150th Anniversary Edition, ed. David S. Reynol✱ds (Oxford University Press, 2005)

PROVENANCE:

E. A. Bigelow (armorial bookplate, dated in ink Feb’y 1894) — Walter P. Chrysler Sr. (morocco booklabel; Parke-Bernet, 8 December 1954,🍸 lot 329) — Frederic Dannay (Christie’s New York, 16 December 1983, lot 367) — Victor and Irene Murr Jacobs (Sotheby’s New York, 29 October 1996, lot 455)