Leaves of Grass.
Walt Whitman,
an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
ICELEBRATE myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
His rooms. Sky—Days and Nights—Happiness . . . . The Voice of the Rain . . . . This Compost . . . . Soon Shall the Winter’s Foil Be Here . . . . Spirit That Form’d This Scene . . . . Twilight . . . . What is the grass? . . . . Afoot and light-hearted . . . . The Poem of Earth
Brooklyn, New York: 1855.
The sheet, as the press gives it
Brooklyn, 1855
“small quarto 9 by 12 inches, 95 pages—in the type called ‘English’—was not stereotyped—800 copies were struck off on a hand press by Andrew Rome … the author himself setting some of the type”
“about one hundred pages: out of them I set up ten or so”
Andrew Rome’s small job shop stood at Fulton and Cranberry Streets; his brother Thomas, nineteen, helped. It was probably the shop’s first book.