Leaves of Grass.

WHITMAN, Walt.

$12,500.00

Item Number: 139829

Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1881-82.

The “suppressed Boston edition” (seventh edition overall) of the most important volume in American poetry, one of 1,010 copies printed. Octavo, original publisher’s mustard cloth with gilt titles and tooling to the spine and front panel, tissue-guarded engraved portrait of the author by Hollyer after the daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison opposite page 29. BAL 21418. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “Dr. C H Shivers from the author.” The recipient, Dr. C.H. Shivers was a Haddonfield, New Jersey-based physician, member of the New Jersey Medical Society for Camden County and friend and dinner companion of Whitman’s (according to The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, Vol. 4, Correspondence of Walt Whitman, 1989). The Suppressed Edition was the earliest edition to have Leaves of Grass in what is considered the book’s final form. The suppressed edition’s electroplates were used in all later editions, including the so-called “Death Bed Edition.” “On March 1, 1882, Oliver Stevens, district attorney for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, suggested to James R. Osgood & Co., that this edition should be withdrawn from publication because of its obscene nature. After some discussion between Whitman, the publishers and the attorney general about alterations and excisions to remedy the situation, Whitman decided in early April against making the necessary changes. James R. Osgood & Co., then decided to cease acting as publisher and on May 17, 1882, reached an agreement with Whitman whereby Whitman received $100, 225 copies, more or less, in sheets, and the plates and dies, in return for all claims for royalties and cancelling the contract. On May 19 Whitman wrote to the Boston binder, S.H. Sanborn, requesting him to send the 225 sets of sheets to James Arnold of Philadelphia, and to the Boston printers, Rand & Avery, requesting them to prepare 225 copies of a new title leaf. Whitman sent out the first copies of this this issue on June 11, 1882.” (BAL, Vol. 9, p. 43). In very good condition. Exceptionally rare signed by Whitman.

“No one knows for certain how Whitman raised the money to pay for the first Leaves of Grass… Whitman had taken his manuscript to a couple of friends, the brothers James and Thomas Rome, who had a printing shop at the corner of Fulton and Cranberry Streets. Possibly the author had tried a commercial publisher first and had the book rejected. If so, he kept quiet about it. The Romes did print a few books but specialized in the printing of legal documents. Whitman, a proud and skilled printer, moved in on them to oversee the production of Leaves. They allowed him to set type himself whenever he felt like it. Ten pages or so were his own work. He had a routine and a special chair over in the corner… The engraved portrait facing the title page (showed) a person who looked as if he might be the printer rather than the author. He was unnamed… Before a reader reached the dozen untitled poems there stood the barrier of the preface, an off-putting obstacle of ten pages of weirdly punctuated prose in close print, set in double columns. The poems themselves were in more readable type, laid across a wide format to accommodate the strangely long and irregular lines. The inking was spotty and must have given Whitman some qualms, but he had no money to spare for anything better… The centerpiece of his strange book, in the ‘rough and ragged thicket of its pages,’ was a sustained poem of fifty-two sections called ‘Song of Myself… If Emerson is, in John Dewey’s words, the philosopher of democracy, then Whitman is indisputably its poet. In Whitman we have a democrat who set out to imagine the life of the average man in average circumstances changed into something grand and heroic… He claimed that he had never been given a proper hearing, and spent his whole life trying to publish himself. A hundred years after his death, the strange fate of his book is known. He said often enough that it had been a financial failure, signed it and himself over to posterity, a ‘candidate for the future… There has never been a more remarkable poem” (Callow, From Noon to Starry Night). “Always the champion of the common man, Whitman is both the poet and the prophet of democracy… In a sense, it is America’s second Declaration of Independence: that of 1776 was political, this of 1855 intellectual” (PMM 340). The most important and influential volume of poetry written in America, Whitman’s literary masterpiece, Leaves of Grass is “one of the most magnificent fabrications of modern times… he never surrendered… his vision of himself as one who might go forth among the American people and astonish them…” (DAB). The first edition of Leaves of Grass was a failure with the public, but upon receiving a copy, Emerson responded with his famous letter. “I find it [Leaves of Grass] the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed… I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”