Copies of the first edition are regularly some of the most expensive American books sold at rare-book auctions, with recent copies going for as much as $200,000. A recent census of extant copies of the first edition reveals that nearly 200 copies survive today. As William White has shown, 795 copies were printed in all, 599 of which were bound in cloth with varying degrees of gilt, the rest of them in paper or boards.

Printed in the shop of Andrew Rome of Brooklyn (where Andrew was assisted by his younger brother Tom), the quarto-size volume was designed and published by Whitman himself, who is also believed to have set the type for a few of its 95 pages. The first Leaves of Grass was put on sale in at least two stores, one in New York and another in Brooklyn, in late June of 1855. As Leaves of Grass grew through its five subsequent editions into a hefty book of 389 poems (with the addition of the two annexes), it gained much in variety and complexity, but Whitman's distinctive voice was never stronger, his vision never clearer, and his design never more improvisational than in the twelve poems of the first edition. Recognize and possibly understand their own. Memory because in the world of his imagination Americans have learned to Slender volume introduced the poet who, celebrating the nation byĬelebrating himself, has since remained at the heart of America's cultural

The importance of the first edition of Leaves of Grass to American literary history is impossible to exaggerate. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), reproduced by permission.

Leaves of grass 1855