Scholars believe this is the reason the book is so large-the paper on hand and the press were all set for legal forms. It was printed at his friend Andrew Rome’s print shop in between runs of legal forms. Leaves of Grass was a self-published work, and Whitman, himself a trained printer, set much of the type. He received answers from owners (including Boatwright) as to which binding they owned, the frontispiece picture, typos contained and changes made. He had collected information from all the known owners of the book looking for information about the various anomalies that make this edition so fascinating. In the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review in 2006, he printed a Census of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. This edition has been widely studied, especially by Ed Folsom of the University of Iowa. Sometime later, an antiquarian book seller’s catalog listed a copy for sale in excess of $170,000, making our book possibly the most monetarily valuable book in our collection and worth a little extra study. A resident Whitman scholar, Rob Nelson, director of the Digital Scholarship Lab, saw it and was amazed that we owned one of the 158 known copies still extent. We were duly proud of this copy and used it in a display some months ago. The Galvin Rare Book Room has a copy of the 1855 first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
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