Methods
Where the texts and pictures on these pages come from, what rights they carry, and how the words were checked.
The opening note
Whitman published the 1855 Leaves of Grass himself and paid Andrew Rome to print it: the Walt Whitman Archive, “Introduction to the Variorum Edition of the 1855 Leaves of Grass”, edited by Kenneth M. Price, Ed Folsom, and Nicole Gray.
He set “ten or so” of its pages in type, by his own account to Horace Traubel on October 12, 1888: Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (July 16–October 31, 1888) (New York: D. Appleton, 1908), page 471, at the Internet Archive.
The binder, Charles Jenkins of Brooklyn, billed him for 795 copies bound between June 1855 and January 1856: 599 in cloth, “predominantly green”, the title stamped in gold, and the rest in paper or boards. His statement is at the Library of Congress (the Feinberg Collection); the Walt Whitman Archive, “Binding Records”, by Nicole Gray.
The texts
The 1855 Leaves of Grass was first drawn from the Walt Whitman Archive’s transcription (CC BY 4.0), then corrected word by word to the Library of Congress’s copy (the Feinberg Whitman Collection, copy 3), from the Library’s photographs. Where the two differed, we studied the photograph to make a decision.
Lines quoted from later editions are set from the printing named beside them, and checked against a photograph of the page.
The pictures
The pictures of Whitman’s books and prints are from libraries’ photographs of particular copies: the Library of Congress’s, the Boston Public Library’s, and the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection’s, by way of the Internet Archive.
Rights
The books and prints shown here are in the public domain. The libraries’ photographs are used under their own statements: the Library of Congress, “not aware of any U.S. copyright or any other restrictions”; the Boston Public Library, “No Copyright - United States”; the Internet Archive, for scholarship and research.
Footnotes
Where a question arises on a page, a footnote answers it there. The footnotes are listed together, by page.
Corrections
When we find an error, or someone tells us of one, we fix it on its page and list it, with its date, in the corrections log.