Whitman Pays the Printing Expenses For the 1867 Edition of “Leaves of Grass”

Walt Whitman is the only major American poet of the 19th century to have an intimate association with the art of bookmaking. Everyone knows Whitman as a poet and the author of one of the most studied books of American poetry, “Leaves of Grass.” What is less well known is that Whitman was trained as a printer and throughout his life spent time in printing shops and binderies, often setting type himself and always intimately involved in the design and production of his books. Whitman did not just write his book, he made his book, and he made it over and over again, each time producing a different material object that spoke to its readers in different ways.

The first edition of “Leaves of Grass” (1855) was self-published, and Whitman designed the binding, chose the typeface, designed the pages, worked with an engraver on the frontispiece, and even set some of the type himself.  “I sometimes find myself more interested in book making than in book writing,” he once said; “the way books are made—that always excites my curiosity: the way books are written—that only attracts me once in a great while.”

The first postbellum edition of “Leaves of Grass” is probably the most difficult to find. Though there was only one printing of this edition, there are at least three different versions because Whitman was already trying to figure out how or even whether the Civil War fit into “Leaves of Grass.’ At times Whitman indicated Leaves was now a book of the past, “proofs of phases passed away,” but at other times he believed that Leaves would have to evolve with the changing nation, absorb its traumas and work toward its uncertain future. In the summer of 1866, he wrote that he was “coming to New York, principally to bring out a new & much better edition” of Leaves. By the end of August he had engaged the New York printer William E. Chapin to have “the composition & presswork done in from two to three weeks.” With all supplements included, there were a total of 236 poems in the 1867 edition As a text that circulated in the midst of an unsettled atmosphere of postwar Reconstruction America, this edition provides a fertile site in representing the incipient nationalist ideology that intensified in the years following Appomattox. On publication, the critical attention devoted to this edition underscored Whitman’s nationalism.

Chapin completed the printing on time for the books to be ready for dissemination in late November 1866. But the title page says 1867 (which is the year by which the edition is known), and it was not until then that copies were readily available for distribution. Each copy cost $3. Autograph Letter Signed, Attorney’s General’s Office, Washington, December 6, 1866, to Chapin, making payment for some of the book’s printing expenses. “Enclosed find a check for Twenty Five dollars. Please send me a receipt for the same – don’t fail.” Whitman seems very insistant on getting a receipt from Chapin, but he must have trusted him, as Chapin would reissue the edition twice more in 1868.