The Walt Whitman Archive
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 derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), and supplemented, updated, or created by Whitman Archive staff as appropriate.
Contributors to digital file: Kirsten Clawson, Stefan Schöberlein, Nima Najafi Kianfar, and Nicole Gray
 image 1 |  image 2 |
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]