Case 4
- Illustrated & Private Press Editions
Walt Whitman. Poems from Leaves of Grass. Illustrations by Margaret C. Cook. London: J.M. Dent; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1913.
Twenty-one years after Whitman’s death, Everyman’s Library series creator J.M. Dent published what remains one of the more extravagant editions of Leaves of Grass, a large, lavish boxed tome bound in gilt-stamped green cloth, sensuously illustrated with twenty-four colour plates by English artist Margaret C. Cook.
Walt Whitman. Poems from Leaves of Grass. Illustrations by Margaret C. Cook. London: J.M. Dent; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1913.
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Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1929.
This 1929 printing of Leaves of Grass follows the text of the first edition of 1855. It was only the second book to be issued by the Limited Editions Club, limited to 1,500 numbered copies signed by the designer, Frederic Warde.
The frontispiece features a commonly reproduced photograph of Whitman, in characteristically plain attire, taken by Frank Pearsall when the poet was aged in his early fifties.
Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. Illustrations by Lewis C. Daniel. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940.
This illustrated version of Leaves of Grass is open at ‘The Return of the Heroes’, one of several poems Whitman wrote about the aftermath of the Civil War. A memorial to the dead, the poem also praises the technological advances being made in agriculture and industry.
An earlier version of the poem, entitled ‘A Carol of Harvests, for 1867’, was published in Whitman’s collection A Passage to India (1870). The revised version was published as ‘The Return of the Heroes’ in the 1881-82 edition of Leaves of Grass.
The illustrations in this Doubleday version of Leaves of Grass are by Lewis C. Daniel.
Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. Illustrations by Lewis C. Daniel. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940.
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