Complete Poems and Prose of Walt Whitman

1888. Camden, New Jersey: Walt Whitman, 1888.

4to, [2], 382, 374, 140, 2pp., plus four plates of illustrations, including frontis. Original 3/4 green cloth and marbled boards, paper label, top edge gilt. Label worn, wear to backstrip and edges, inner hinges repaired with narrow reinforcement to gutters of first few leaves. Sensitively conserved and preserved in a cloth box.

§ Copy #86 of 600 numbered copies, signed by Whitman. This limited edition was one of 600 copies with Horace Traubel's manuscript limitation statement in red ink on the verso of "Note at Beginning": "Edition: Six Hundred. Number eighty six." This is one of 150 (truncated) copies in this binding. This is the definitive edition of Whitman's work issued in his lifetime, published four years before his death. This volume includes: LEAVES OF GRASS, printed from the slightly altered plates of the Philadelphia, 1882 printing, with Whitman's facsimile signature on the titlepage; SPECIMEN DAYS & COLLECT, printed from slightly altered plates of the Glasgow, 1883 printing; and NOVEMBER BOUGHS, from the second printing, 1888. The illustrations include an engraved portrait of Whitman as a young man facing p.29 ("Song of Myself" and a photographic reproduction of an engraved portrait of an older Whitman facing p.296 ("Out from Behind this Mask") in LEAVES OF GRASS, and a photographic portrait of Whitman at seventy years old facing the titlepage of NOVEMBER BOUGHS. BAL 21431 (binding A). MYERSON A2.7.m (binding A). (Inventory #: 125565)