Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to James R. Osgood & Company, 7 June 1881

Date: June 7, 1881

Whitman Archive ID: yal.00109

Source: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Notes for this letter were created by Whitman Archive staff and/or were derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), and supplemented or updated by Whitman Archive staff.

Contributors to digital file: Kirsten Clawson, Stefan Schöberlein, Nima Najafi Kianfar, and Nicole Gray



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431 Stevens Street
Camden New Jersey
June 7 '81

Dear Sirs

Would you have set up for me from the copy enclosed two sample pages size of the below diagram?1 I think—am pretty sure—the book (400 pages about) will go in long primer solid. But I would like to have a sample page in bourgeois too for my calculations2—I hope it will be new type—The typographical show of my poems—how they shall show (negatively as well as absolutely) on the black & white page—is always in my idea in making them—I am printer enough for that—


Walt Whitman


Notes:

1. This page includes a pencil drawing by Whitman with the following note: "this is the size of the printed page without the folio & running title—set up a sample one page from the copy in long primer solid—Then another sample, one page, in bourgeois solid, & send me." [back]

2. The firm sent on June 10 "3 sample pages of the size you indicated." [back]


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