“It is possible that no two copies are identical. Instead of thinking about mechanical regularity, you need to think about change and fluidity to understand the 1855 (version),” Price said. “We tend to think of books as stable objects, but you might think of his first edition as vibrating and humming. When completed, the project will record and provide background on each variation. Kenneth Price, Hillegass Professor of English and the center’s co-director, has earned a three-year, $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to examine at least 20 copies of the original 1855 edition of “Leaves of Grass.” The CDRH will start a digital variorum – a collection containing different versions of the text – on the Walt Whitman Archive. Now, researchers from the University of Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities are identifying and cataloging those variations. In an old shop that specialized in legal documents, Walt Whitman painstakingly published his first edition of “Leaves of Grass.”īetween setting type and hand-pressing words on pages, Whitman continued to revise the text, generating a remarkable variety of versions of the first edition released in 1855, a book long assumed to be consistent across its first copies.
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