Your subscription for my Book is received—for which hearty thanks. Excuse temporary delay—the small first edition being exhausted, & [another being in the] press. Your Volume [incomplete]
Draft letter.
After the first printing of the 1876 edition was exhausted, there was a delay until Whitman had 600 additional copies printed (see Whitman's September 1, 1876 letter to William Michael Rossetti). This note undoubtedly was the draft of a letter which Whitman sent to those people who had to wait for the second printing.
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