Leaves of Grass [with:] Two Rivulets (Signed author's edition)

Camden, New Jersey: [Walt Whitman], 1876. Author's Edition. Very Good. With both volumes signed by Whitman (Leaves on the title-page and Two Rivulets on the frontisportrait, as issued). This is the "Author's Edition," self-published by Whitman, comprising the fifth edition, third printing, second issue of Leaves of Grass and the first printing, first issue of Two Rivulets. Only between 750 and 800 copies of the set were produced (Walt Whitman Archive). A Very Good copy. Two volumes, octavo. Complete, with the two portraits of Whitman in Leaves and the photographic frontisportrait in Two Rivulets. Both volumes bound in the original half cream calf over marbled paper boards. Rebacked to style. Some rubbing to corners. Retaining the original yellow endpapers. With some pencil marginalia on about twenty pages in Leaves and a bit of offsetting to the title-page of Rivulets. Otherwise clean throughout. An appealing set, with both volumes signed by Whitman.

A scarce and prized pair of Whitman classics, self-published and sold by him in an edition of no more than 800 copies. The poet had suffered a stroke in 1873 and was, by 1876, living with relatives. He published this set to generate an income and secure his independence. In May of 1876, he wrote to Robert Buchanan, the English critic who championed his work, "I shall [...] continue to be my own publisher & bookseller [...] the set $10."

Leaves of Grass is, of course, Whitman's masterpiece, boldly opening with "Song of Myself," one of the most celebrated poems in the American canon. Two Rivulets, the more obscure of the two works, reflects on the American centennial: Whitman sought "an original way to celebrate America's second century in this 1876 centennial year. He does so by envisioning an 'ideal' America of limitless possibilities without relinquishing the 'real' America of national, political, and economic embroilments" (Walt Whitman Archive). Although less popular than Leaves of Grass, Two Rivulets was no less visionary in its composition and structure: the Walt Whitman Archive calls the work a "radical experiment" that interweaves prose, poetry, photography, and creative printing techniques; Whitman himself wrote that the work compiles "Experiments, under the urge of powerful, quite irresistible, perhaps wilful influences, (even escapades)" that "have been recited, as it were, by my Soul" (Two Rivulets, p. 11). Very Good.