Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Announcements, Summer 2010

Trachtenberg, Alan

English

"Undrape!": On Naked Readers in Melville and Whitman

Conrad, Eric

Whitman and the Proslavery Press: Newly Recovered 1860 Reviews

Henkel, Scott

Leaves of Grassroots Politics: Whitman, Carlyle, and the Imagination of Democratic Vistas

Bradford, Adam

Re-collecting Soldiers: Walt Whitman and the Appreciation of Human Value

Hidy, Lance

153
NOTES
ThE IlluSTraTION aNd TypOgraphy Of Specimen 
DayS, aNd a lOST WhITmaN pOrTraIT fOuNd  
The first illustrated edition of Specimen Days by Walt Whitman appeared in 
1971, displaying the imprint of david r. godine, publisher, Boston. The 
book, which contained a new introduction by alfred Kazin, received a posi-
tive review from leo marx in The new york Times Sunday Book Review. my 
name appears in the credit on the copyright page: “The book was designed, 
researched and edited by lance hidy.”
as a visual learner who earned 
poor to mediocre grades in English 
at yale, I would probably have been 
voted the least likely person in my 
class (1968) to be editor for such a 
book—especially at the age of 24. 
The following story explains how 
this improbable event transpired. 
In addition, the editor of this jour-
nal, Ed folsom, has asked me to 
tell how I became the owner of a 
lost photograph of Whitman made 
in 1889 by frederick gutekunst. 
much of the credit for this re-
markable edition of Specimen Days 
goes to david godine—who first 
had the idea, and then paid for it. It 
was also david who invited alfred 
Kazin to write his essay. Just as I 
was the product of the undergradu-
ate presses at yale, david had his 
start in ray Nash’s graphic arts 
Workshop at dartmouth. after 
being introduced to each other by 
our mentor leonard Baskin, david 
invited me to help him start a private press. The plan was to issue fine, illus-
trated letterpress books that we would print ourselves, inspired by Baskin’s 
gehenna press.
While I was making wood engravings, arranging typography, and running 
presses, david was hunting for neglected gems of american literature. Specimen 
Days was new to me, since, like most students, I had only heard of Leaves of 
Grass. When, at david’s suggestion, I read it, I was stunned. I returned im-
154
mediately to Leaves of Grass, which I then understood in a new way. for me, 
it was Specimen Days, rather than the poetry, that opened my understanding 
of the man. 
having agreed that we would publish Specimen Days, we then wanted to 
figure out how to illustrate it. for Whitman’s description of the Civil War, 
david thought of using photographs by matthew Brady. I had an idea that we 
could find several portrait photographs of Whitman too. With that, in 1970, 
I departed from Boston, alone in my Volkswagen bus. my first stop would be 
the Brady collection in the library of Congress.
meanwhile, my appetite for Whitman was growing. I read all of the prose 
works, along with several editions of Leaves. I tried to read everything written 
about Whitman by those who knew him. I even read Bucke’s cosmic conscious-
ness. By the time I checked into the ymCa in Washington, I was in a kind of 
Whitman reverie. This trance-like state of mind went deeper when I entered 
the library of Congress. unknown to me, the display cases in the huge exhibit 
hall were filled with Whitman memorabilia from the collection of Charles E. 
feinberg: Walt’s rucksack, tickets from his lincoln lectures, books, pages of 
handwriting, and portraits.
although I had spent many hours roaming the stacks at yale’s Sterling 
memorial library, searching for illustrated books, I had little experience in 
formal scholarly research. With the help of the lC staff, I was able to locate 
and order photographic copies of portraits of Whitman and other documents, 
as well as photographs selected from the file cabinets containing the matthew 
Brady Civil War archive.
I made additional stops at the duke university library, the Walt Whitman 
house in Camden, the New york public library, and yale’s Beinecke rare 
Book and manuscript library, where I still had friends among the library staff. 
In New york, I had an appointment with Oliver Jensen, publisher of american 
Heritage magazine, to ask if he’d like to publish something connected to our 
illustrated edition of Specimen Days. mr. Jensen was delightful, and although 
he declined to publish any of our material, he did offer me a job at the maga-
zine—which I declined.
The staff at the library of Congress told me how to contact mr. Charles 
feinberg. When I told feinberg by telephone what I was doing, he insisted 
that I come to his home in detroit as soon as possible so he could show me 
additional material from Whitman’s Civil War period, and more portraits. 
he seemed as excited by our Specimen Days project as I was. While graciously 
acquiescing to every request to borrow photographs and documents, feinberg, 
like Oliver Jensen, offered me a job on the spot. he suggested that I move 
to detroit to help him organize his collections—but, once again, I declined.
The biggest surprise to come out of this research was the quantity of pho-
tographic portraits of Whitman. I finally had sixty-five of them, all of which 
would be beautifully reproduced in offset duotone, full page, by the meriden 
gravure Company. as large as that number seemed at the time, it was only 
half of the 128 portraits that are now published on the website of the Walt 
Whitman archive. But in 1971, those sixty-five portraits seemed like a revela-
tion, putting Whitman among the most-photographed people in the world 
during those early decades of photography.
155
Evidently I was more interested in researching and editing the images than 
I was in textual matters. regrettably, the copy that david and I sent to the 
Stinehour press to be composed in monotype Bembo was a poor choice, as we 
felt obliged to confess on the copyright page after it was too late to correct our 
error: “Spelling and punctuation have been changed to conform with modern 
usage.” for the most part, this meant that contractions had been spelled out, 
and the apostrophes removed.
left: Sample of monotype Bembo 
composed by The Stinehour press, 
showing the use of leaf ornaments 
instead of line breaks within the 
mini-chapters of Specimen Days.
as proud as I was of the visual 
content, and of the design and 
printing of our volume, I was 
embarrassed by this flaw. I sent 
the finished book to gay Wilson 
allen, who never responded—a 
silence that I attributed, with a 
trace of paranoia, to our book’s 
weakness, and to my being an 
impostor among the true Whit-
man scholars. 
I have since recovered from 
my humiliation, recognizing that 
the book’s visual content did 
make a significant contribution, 
bringing overdue recognition to 
a little-known masterpiece. Our 
Specimen Days was also a superb 
example of the fine bookmaking 
tradition that continues to keep 
me rooted in New England in 2009. prior to this large project, I had only 
worked on small, limited editions, printed by myself, often illustrated with 
my etchings or wood engravings, and with type composed either by hand or 
by hot metal monotype casters.
as much as I loved these hand-crafted, small-edition exercises, I quickly 
tired of their limited reach. I aspired to work in what seemed to me like the 
major league of trade book publishing, epitomized for david and me by The 
Stinehour press in lunenburg, Vermont, and The meriden gravure Company 
in meriden, Connecticut. These two organizations often collaborated, with 
meriden printing the halftones, and Stinehour taking care of the typography.
 at 224 pages, 8 3/8 X 11 5/8 inches, Specimen Days was the first full-scale 
book design that I had undertaken. more importantly it gave me a chance 
to work with the skilled book arts people at meriden and Stinehour. The 
156
lessons I learned there, especially regarding photographic reproduction and 
typographic planning for complex books, provided a foundation that I am 
still building upon today.
Now I’d like to mention the odd structure of the text of Specimen Days be-
cause it had a strong effect upon the book’s unorthodox design. The text was 
characterized by the author in his first paragraph: “. . . untie the bundle, reel 
out diary scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after 
another, into print pages, and let the mélange’s lacking and wants of connec-
tion take care of themselves.” Consequently, each page spread had four to six 
mini-chapters, each with its own title, and sometimes a date. 
These ultra-short chapters often consisted of a single paragraph, or two 
or three. To the typographer, this brevity provided the luxury of separating 
paragraphs only by the insertion of a leaf ornament mid-line, rather than the 
usual practice of starting on a new, indented line. In normal metal composition, 
such linking of paragraphs was too risky. for example, if a word was repeated 
by mistake, not only would its paragraph need to be reset, but all the text that 
flowed after it would have to be reset too. In the economics of metal composi-
tion, one could not risk having to reset more than one paragraph at a time. 
But for this edition of Specimen Days I did what I have never done since—I 
used the second duotone color for the leaf ornaments to indicate the start of 
a new paragraph. While many people may not be conscious of this treatment, 
it contributes to the integrity of the pages, where the only line spaces occur 
before the title of a new section.
One other unusual feature of the design is the table of contents. Each of the 
215 sections has its own title. The list of titles reads like a poem. for example
ThE WOmEN Of ThE WEST
ThE SIlENT gENEral
prESIdENT hayES’S SpEEChES
ST. lOuIS mEmOraNda
NIghTS ON ThE mISSISSIppI
upON Our OWN laNd
Edgar pOE’S SIgNIfICaNCE
BEEThOVEN’S SEpTET
a hINT Of WIld NaTurE
lOafINg IN ThE WOOdS
a CONTralTO VOICE
The surprising juxtapositions in this list were typical Whitman. This in-
spired me to use a grand and spacious typographic treatment, composing the 
table of contents in letter-spaced capitals, single column, on eight pages—
thirty-six titles to a page. a wild extravagance. I wonder if anybody ever took 
the time to read the whole list.
during the years immediately following the publication of Specimen Days in 
1971, I started collecting first editions of Whitman—at least the ones I could 
afford. One New york book dealer offered me a manila folder of miscellaneous 
Whitman items from the descendants of Thomas harned, Whitman’s friend 
157
and lawyer. The date was sometime between 1971 and 1974, and I remember 
paying $100.
The prize of the batch was a beautiful gutekunst portrait of Whitman which 
I had never seen—for if I had, it would have been included in the book. after 
enjoying the photograph for some 35 years, I decided to do a google image 
search for Walt Whitman on a Sunday morning in april, 2009. I was surprised 
to find that this image was not included in the Walt Whitman archive’s col-
lection of 128 portraits.
The 1889 gutekunst photograph (4 ¾ x 6 ½,” collection of lance hidy) is compared 
here with the painting reproduced on the back cover of the Spring 2008 issue of the 
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. The reproduction of the photograph on the left has had 
scratches and the tone scale slightly adjusted in photoshop by lh for greater clarity.
above are the known photographs from the 1889 gutekunst session.
158
as it dawned on me that I might have a unique print, unknown to scholars, 
I sent a jpeg of my photograph to the first three staff names at the Whitman 
archive. Two hours and forty-seven minutes later I received this e-mail from 
Ed folsom:
I can’t thank you enough for sending us that remarkable gutekunst photograph of 
Whitman. This answers one mystery that has been haunting us for a couple of years. 
many years ago, geoffrey Sill, who teaches at rutgers-Camden, was given an old 
damaged negative of an image of Whitman that had been handed down through gen-
erations of Camden, NJ, residents. geoffrey shared the negative with us a few years 
ago, and we did the best we could to nudge the image out through photoshop. finally, 
geoffrey had the negative restored, and when he made a print, he was astonished to 
find that what we had thought to be a photograph of Whitman actually emerged as 
a painting. It was clearly a painting based on a photograph (or, geoffrey insisted, a 
heavily retouched photo), and clearly it derived from the gutekunst sitting, but it was 
a photo none of us had seen. Now we have!
also in the folder along with the photo-
graph was a typewritten, unsigned copy of 
Whitman’s will of may 15, 1873. a note is 
pencilled on the front: 
Supplement to 
a will made in 
1872—Lost—
—
Original—Lost
—
The only known
copy—to be 
returned to 
T. B. Harned
as I learned from Ed folsom, the manu-
script version of this will is in the Barrett 
collection at the alderman library, univer-
sity of Virginia. my copy is of typographic 
interest as an early example of typewriter 
type, which first appeared in 1873. al-
though the will is officially dated 1873, it 
was probably copied by a typist sometime 
thereafter.
The manila folder also contained a let-
ter from Evie allison allen, dated June 
14, 1957, thanking mrs. harned for her 
hospitality when she and her husband gay 
Wilson allen visited. Thus the harned fam-
ily provenance of my gutekunst photograph 
is established. 
159
I long ago sold my Whitman editions, but I display the gutekunst portrait 
where I can see it every day. I am grateful to Ed folsom and the Walt Whitman 
Quarterly Review for allowing me to share it with you.
northern essex community college           Lance Hidy
am I NOT a maN aNd a pOET?: a rECENTly rECOVErEd 
WhITmaN CarICaTurE
The february 27, 1869, issue of punch, Victorian England’s premier satirical 
rag, features a previously undocumented article on Walt Whitman entitled 
“he is a man.”  punch, edited at the time by mark lemon (who co-founded 
the periodical along with henry mayhew), takes this opportunity to contradict 
painter and atlantic monthly art critic Eugene Benson, who claimed that, “[w]
henever [Whitman] speaks, you hear the voice of a man in his agony, in his 
gladness, in his transports.” Benson’s rhapsodic praise of the american poet 
appears in his essay “Charles Baudelaire, poet of the malign” published in 
the same february 1869 issue of the atlantic, where Whitman’s “proud music 
of the Sea-Storm,” ultimately titled “proud music of the Storm,” was first 
printed.1 punch’s “he is a man” reprints reactions to Benson’s comments on 
Whitman from two other periodicals—Theodore hagen’s New york Weekly 
Review2 and Britain’s preeminent music journal, musical World,3 then edited 
by James William davison.  accompanying the text of “he is a man” is the 
racist caricature of a black male having his forehead shined and/or blackened 
while reclining on a sidewalk—an image entirely of punch’s own invention. 
punch—whose comedic affect martha 
Banta describes as a merger of “cheeky, 
Cockney irreverence” and “sanctified British 
tradition”4—had previously dismissed Leaves 
of Grass as proof that the “fields of american 
literature” needed “weeding dreadfully.”5 
published thirteen years after this initial 
critique, “he is a man” marks punch’s 
return to transatlantic Whitman-bashing.6 
punch begins its 1869 attack on Whitman by 
thanking musical World for the opportunity 
to lampoon “such trash”:
punch is indebted to the musical World for call-
ing his attention to the following bit of keenness 
and justice. he did not see, at first, what the topic 
had to do with music; but, on second thoughts, 
the wisdom of the editor of the m.W. in extracting 
the passage became evident—those who praise 
such trash as mr. Whitman’s perform on the 
instrument called fiddle-faddle, which the m.W. has of course a right to criticise:—


The Illustration and Typography of Specimen Days, and a Lost Whitman Portrait Found

Blake, David Haven

Los Angeles, 1960: John F. Kennedy and Whitman's Ship of Democracy

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 27, no. 4

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 1/

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 1/2

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Spring 2010

Folsom, Ed

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