![WHITMAN, Walt (1819-1892). Leaves of Grass. Washington [New York: J.S. Redfield], 1871. 8° (205 x 124mm). Sheet of adverts tipped onto the rear pastedown. (Occasional scattered spotting, wear to deckle edges.) Publisher's purple pebble-grain cloth spine and stiff green marbled wrappers, spine with printed paper label, in a custom green morocco slipcase (rubbed, corners and edges chipped, front hinge cracked, spine torn and chipped). [With, tipped-in:]](https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/2005/CKS/2005_CKS_07046_0246_000(101605).jpg?w=1)
Details
WHITMAN, Walt (1819-1892). Leaves of Grass. Washington [New York: J.S. Redfield], 1871. 8° (205 x 124mm). Sheet of adverts tipped onto the rear pastedown. (Occasional scattered spotting, wear to deckle edges.) Publisher's purple pebble-grain cloth spine and stiff green marbled wrappers, spine with printed paper label, in a custom green morocco slipcase (rubbed, corners and edges chipped, front hinge cracked, spine torn and chipped). [With, tipped-in:]
WHITMAN, Walt. Autograph letter signed to F.S. Ellis proposing an English edition of Leaves of Grass, Department of Justice, Washington D.C., August 10, 1871, 3 pages 8°, folded once (spotting, clean tear at fold, the width of the fold at page 3, through Whitman's signature, without loss).
Provenance: Walt Whitman (pencilled revisions in text and ALS presenting the book) -- F.S. Ellis (pencilled inscription noting that the corrections are in Whitman's hand).
CORRECTED COPY WITH WHITMAN'S PENCILLED REVISIONS AND AN IMPORTANT ALS TO F.S. ELLIS TRANSMITTING THE BOOK AS A DUMMY FOR A PROPOSED ENGLISH EDITION. 'I take the liberty of writing at a venture to propose to you the publication (in a moderate price volume) of a full edition of my poems Leaves of Grass in England under my sanction [...] I send by same mail with this a revised vol. of L.of G. as copy. I make the proposition not only to get my poems before the British public -- but because I am annoyed at the horrible dismemberment of my book there already -- and the possibility of something worse [...] Style of getting it up, price, rate of renumeration to me, &c. I leave entirely to you -- Only the text must [be] sacredly preserved, verbatim.' Whitman had worked for over two years, from the time the last sheets of the 1867 edition were bound until 1870 to produce his 'new and improved' edition. Though Whitman was keen to see a suitable edition of his works published in England, it appears that the proposed edition did not go ahead - instead Whitman eventually shipped a number of copies of this American edition for sale in England.
Frederick Startridge Ellis (1830-1901), antiquarian bookseller and author, took premises on Bond Street in 1872 which became a gathering place for the literati of the day. Ellis counted among his friends William Morris and D.G. Rossetti, whose works he brought out, A. C. Swinburne, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and John Ruskin, whose Stray Letters to a London Bibliopole were addressed to Ellis. He edited many Kelmscott Press productions, and read the proofs of Chaucer's Works, Morris's masterpiece. He catalogued, with Hazlitt, Henry Huth's famous library, and compiled A Lexical Concordance to the Poetical Works of P. B. Shelley (1892). The present copy is from the second issue of this fifth edition, which adds Passage to India. Myerson A 2.5.a2.
WHITMAN, Walt. Autograph letter signed to F.S. Ellis proposing an English edition of Leaves of Grass, Department of Justice, Washington D.C., August 10, 1871, 3 pages 8°, folded once (spotting, clean tear at fold, the width of the fold at page 3, through Whitman's signature, without loss).
Provenance: Walt Whitman (pencilled revisions in text and ALS presenting the book) -- F.S. Ellis (pencilled inscription noting that the corrections are in Whitman's hand).
CORRECTED COPY WITH WHITMAN'S PENCILLED REVISIONS AND AN IMPORTANT ALS TO F.S. ELLIS TRANSMITTING THE BOOK AS A DUMMY FOR A PROPOSED ENGLISH EDITION. 'I take the liberty of writing at a venture to propose to you the publication (in a moderate price volume) of a full edition of my poems Leaves of Grass in England under my sanction [...] I send by same mail with this a revised vol. of L.of G. as copy. I make the proposition not only to get my poems before the British public -- but because I am annoyed at the horrible dismemberment of my book there already -- and the possibility of something worse [...] Style of getting it up, price, rate of renumeration to me, &c. I leave entirely to you -- Only the text must [be] sacredly preserved, verbatim.' Whitman had worked for over two years, from the time the last sheets of the 1867 edition were bound until 1870 to produce his 'new and improved' edition. Though Whitman was keen to see a suitable edition of his works published in England, it appears that the proposed edition did not go ahead - instead Whitman eventually shipped a number of copies of this American edition for sale in England.
Frederick Startridge Ellis (1830-1901), antiquarian bookseller and author, took premises on Bond Street in 1872 which became a gathering place for the literati of the day. Ellis counted among his friends William Morris and D.G. Rossetti, whose works he brought out, A. C. Swinburne, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and John Ruskin, whose Stray Letters to a London Bibliopole were addressed to Ellis. He edited many Kelmscott Press productions, and read the proofs of Chaucer's Works, Morris's masterpiece. He catalogued, with Hazlitt, Henry Huth's famous library, and compiled A Lexical Concordance to the Poetical Works of P. B. Shelley (1892). The present copy is from the second issue of this fifth edition, which adds Passage to India. Myerson A 2.5.a2.
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