?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500
FINE TRANSCENDENTALIST ASSOCIATION WHITMAN, WALT. Leaves of Grass. 2 portraits (after p. 28 and p. 296); and 1 additional portrait laid-in (detached, edges chipped, initialed by Whitman and dated 1855). 8vo, original dark green cloth over bevelled boards, spine gilt-lettered, recased, light wear to extremities, corners bumped; top edges gilt, others uncut; yellow coated endpapers, inner hinges expertly repaired, mounted newsprint clipping to 4 terminal blanks. Camden, NJ: 1882
author's edition, signed in ink by whitman on the title-page. additionally inscribed by whitman to f.b. sanborn on the front free endpaper. The inscription reads in full: "To / FB Sanborn / from the author / with thanks and love / June 11 1882." Franklin B. Sanborn (1831–1917) was an abolitionist and a friend of John Brown. In 1860, when he was tried in Boston because of his refusal to testify before a committee of the U.S. Senate, Whitman was in the courtroom (Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer [New York: Macmillan, 1955], 242). He reviewed Drum-Taps in the Boston Commonwealth on February 24, 1866. He was editor of the Springfield Republican from 1868 to 1872, and the author of books dealing with his friends, Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott.
Wells & Goldsmith, pp. 25-26: "This is a scarce and almost unknown issue; it is doubtful if more than one hundred copies were printed. It appeared after the suppression of the Boston edition [using the plates of that edition (the seventh) and adding a new title-page] and before the first Philadelphia edition was issued ... it is probable that Whitman had these [copies] made for a few friends while waiting for the first Philadelphia edition." Important association copy of the rarest of the Author's Editions. BAL 21418 (reissue); Meyerson A2.7.c3.
