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Whitman
Making Books
Books Making Whitman
Exhibition
November 5, 2005 to
February 12, 2006
Symposium • Schedule • Participants • Free Registration • Maps, Food, Lodging, etc.
The “Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman” exhibition will be held at The University of Iowa Museum of Art from November 5, 2005, through February 12, 2006. The exhibition, curated by David Schoonover, will feature nearly 200 books and broadsides, representing the range of books that Whitman made and the wide variety of fine-press bookmakers who have in turn made Whitman books. The books on exhibit are drawn from The University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections, from the private collection of Kendall Reed, and from the collection at the Salisbury House in Des Moines. Dr. Reed's collection is one of the largest private Whitman collections in the world, and he has generously allowed us to display many of these books in this exhibit for the first time anywhere.
We often make the mistake of referring to Whitman's Leaves of Grass as if it were a single text, a book that went through several editions but generally stayed the same. It was easy to get this impression during the first seventy-five years after Whitman's death, because publishers tended to honor Whitman's request at the end of his life that his final, so-called “Deathbed” edition become the one edition that would be reprinted. Most printings of Whitman's Leaves were therefore the 1881 edition of the book, with Whitman's added old-age “annexes.” Then in the late 1950s, Malcolm Cowley issued a trade-book edition of the 1855 Leaves of Grass and called it the “buried masterpiece of American literature.” From then on, many textbooks began to print the first edition of Leaves as well as the last.
During the past half-century, then, readers have become accustomed to the slim first edition (with only twelve poems) and the very large final edition (with nearly 400 poems). But what has too often been lost in our discussions of Leaves over the past decade is any recognition of those important other editions that came between 1855 and 1881—the 1856, the 1860, the 1867, the 1872. Each of these editions is distinct from the others, both in the poetry each contains and in the material each is made of. Each edition responds directly to a different historical, cultural, and biographical moment. Three are published before the Civil War began, and three afterwards. The war dramatically changed Whitman's attitudes toward the United States and significantly altered the goals—as well as the physical qualities—of Leaves of Grass .
As a typesetter, newspaper editor, and publisher, Whitman was keenly aware of the material aspects of his art. He was engrossed in decisions about typeface, paper, cover design, and book size, even when he worked with commercial publishers. Leaves of Grass is not only a series of quite different editions, but within most of the editions we find another series of quite different book objects, as Whitman experiments with changing cover designs, paper size, and binding, even while using the same plates to print the book. Some of these decisions were prompted by financial concerns, some by aesthetic concerns, and some by his developing notions of how best to reach a growing democratic readership.
“Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman” offers a rare opportunity to examine the full range of Whitman's bookmaking art, to see for the first time the multiple, shifting, various artifacts that all bore the title Leaves of Grass . The exhibition also allows viewers to see the other books Whitman made, from his collection of Civil War poems, Drum-Taps ; to his recollections of the Civil War, Memoranda during the War ; to his companion volume to Leaves , Two Rivulets ; to his autobiography, Specimen Days ; to his various other book-making experiments, ranging from the gathering of his poetry and prose into one volume; to his issuing of poetry/prose mélanges, like November Boughs and Good-Bye My Fancy ; to his issuing of Leaves of Grass in a Bible format. The exhibit demonstrates Whitman's fascination with bookmaking from his first edition through his final days, when he was still worrying about the physical details of his last book.
In part because of Whitman's own involvement in the making of his books, many fine printers from early in the twentieth century up to the present have responded to his work by making Whitman books. “Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman” therefore also displays a generous sampling of fine-press editions of Whitman, many of them printed in very limited editions. The exhibit offers examples from each decade of the twentieth century and from numerous countries, focusing on a variety of responses to Whitman—from gay publications to photographic interpretations of his poetry to illustrated children's books.