TY - JOUR
AU - 
AB - Designing a Variorum of the First Leaves of Grass Matt Cohen and Nicole Gray Abstr act This essay describes the editorial logic behind a recently released variorum of the 1855 edi- tion of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Gra. ssThe history of the composition, printing, bin- ding, distribution, and reading of this set of books informs the design and apparatus of the variorum, which attempts to represent something of the fundamental textual and material instability of the copies that make up the edition. When Walt Whitman took a mind to self-publish a radi- cally new book of poems, he turned to an old, familiar model: Shakespeare. A former printer himself, Whitman would have been accustomed to making print-related calculations, though not perhaps for books of poetry. On a manuscript that may be found at the Harry Ransom Center, he started the process of casting oLfef aves of Grass. He outlined the intended order for his poems, then added up the number of manuscript pages associated with each. He then estimated the “letters in one of my closely written MS pages like page 2”, multiplied that by the manuscript pages (127), then divided by the number of letters on a printed 
TI - Printers of the Kosmos
JF - Textual Cultures
DO - 10.14434/tc.v14i2.33655
DA - 2022-01-04
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/unpaywall/printers-of-the-kosmos-mJmCiAfR57
DP - DeepDyve
ER -