Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to Michael Doolady, 13 November 1867

Date: November 13, 1867

Whitman Archive ID: loc.01566

Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839-1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The transcription presented here is derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), 1:349–350. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Contributors to digital file: Kenneth M. Price, Elizabeth Lorang, Zachary King, Eric Conrad, and Janel Cayer




Nov. 13, 1867.1

In reply to your note of some days since, in reference to acting as my agent, for sale of "Leaves of Grass," I would say as follows:

I presume that Anderson & Archer, binders, No. 6 Reade street, N. Y., have now ready 100 copies, just bound.2 These you can have, if desired, as follows:

14 copies, as I understand from French & Richardson, are due you, having already been paid for by you. The remaining 76 copies you can have at $1 (?) 8cts [each], this is [incomplete]3


Notes:

1. Endorsed (by Walt Whitman): "sent M. Doolady | 448"

Bookseller and publisher, Michael Doolady was the publisher of Ada Clare's Only a Woman's Heart (1866). [back]

2. Walt Whitman later reduced his order to 90 copies for $31.50 in his February 19, 1868 letter to Anderson and Archer. [back]

3. The publishing history of the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass is confused. The first issue was printed by Chapin, and Walt Whitman considered asking Henry E. Huntington Library and Son to distribute it; see Whitman's August 26, 1866 letter to William D. O'Connor. One of the later issues, to which Drum-Taps was added, was bound by James Gray, who became bankrupt; see Whitman's October 13, 1867 letter to Dionysius Thomas. Evidently, Anderson and Archer received and bound the sheets in Gray's possession. Dionysius Thomas and Doolady, rather than Henry E. Huntington Library and Son, distributed the book. According to his letter of February 18, 1868, Whitman paid Anderson and Archer $.35 each for binding Leaves of Grass[back]


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