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Whitman's Leaves of Grass:
Notes on the
Pocketbook (1889) Edition
by
William White
One of the scarce editions of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was published by the poet himself in 1889, especially printed (with addenda) from the 1881 edition, as this is the copyright date printed on the verso of the title-page. The title-page reads: Leaves of Grass [irregular, ornamental letters] / with Sands at Seventy / & A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads. / May 31, 1889. / [8-line note by the poet on his 70th birthday] / Walt Whitman [signed in ink] / Portraits from Life. Autograph. Special Ed'n. / (300 copies only printed—$5 each.) /. The new edition was printed by Ferguson Bros. & Co., Philadelphia, according to a legend below the copyright.
Carolyn Wells and Alfred F. Goldsmith, in their Concise Bibliography of the Works of Walt Whitman (1922), pp. 32-33, describe the 1889 Leaves, citing the number of copies (300): "12mo, limp leather (black morocco), marbled end-papers, made in regular book form and also with flap, pocket-book style with inner pocket for papers, gilt edges, photographic portrait frontispiece, and other illustrations." Frank Shay, The Bibliography of Walt Whitman (1920), p. 29, is briefer, mentioning the 300 copies and adding: "Duodecimo, black morocco, with and without flaps, gilt edges." Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer (1955), p. 533, refers to this edition: "With Traubel's assistance, Whitman realized a long-cherished ambition on his seventieth birthday by publishing a handy pocket-size edition of his Leaves bound in leather, compactly printed in thin paper, with photograph tipped in, and autographed with a prefatory note on the title page."
From unpublished documents in the Feinberg Collection, Detroit—here printed with the kind permission of Mr. Charles E. Feinberg—we can tell what happened and why we have two styles of binding of the 1889 Leaves, and how many copies of each. Whitman sent a "model" copy of the book to Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, the London, Ontario, psychiatrist, who wrote to Horace L. Traubel on 16 June 1889:
Whitman apparently liked the idea of copies "in common book style," for we have his instructions to his binder, written in blue pencil on heavy buff paper: "20 Autograph / First Sheets for Bindery / for 20 copies L of G / bound in green morocco ordinary / mode / (without the pocket book flap / trimm'd close—full gilt)". In the upper right-hand corner, written in ink in Whitman's hand, is "Oldach & Co: / Binders 1215 Filbert St / Phila:"; and in the upper left-hand corner, in Traubel's hand, is the legend, "See Notes July 3, '89". This refers to an as yet unpublished volume of Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden: it contains the date Whitman sent the sheets to be bound in the "ordinary mode."
Thus we know that, of the 300 copies Whitman mentions on the title-page of the 1889 Leaves of Grass, 20 were bound without flaps, leaving 280 with the flap and the tuck. We cannot, however, be absolutely sure there were 280, for we have an initial binding order of only 104 copies. We do know that there were no more than 300 in all, which was all that Whitman intended to issue; in this respect he was scrupulously honest.
Notes
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