#Charles whitman diary how to#

Feinberg: Walt's rucksack, tickets from his Lincoln. Unknown to me, the display cases in the huge exhibit hall were filled with Whitman memorabilia from the collection of Charles E. This trance-like state of mind went deeper when I entered the Library of Congress. By the time I checked into the YMCA in Washington, I was in a kind of Whitman reverie. I even read Bucke's cosmic consciousness. I tried to read everything written about Whitman by those who knew him. I read all of the prose works, along with several editions of Leaves. Meanwhile, my appetite for Whitman was growing. My first stop would be the Brady collection in the Library of Congress. With that, in 1970, I departed from Boston, alone in my Volkswagen bus. I had an idea that we could find several portrait photographs of Whitman too. For Whitman's description of the Civil War, David thought of using photographs by Matthew Brady.

#Charles whitman diary how to#

Having agreed that we would publish Specimen Days, we then wanted to figure out how to illustrate it. For me, it was Specimen Days, rather than the poetry, that opened my understanding of the man. I returned immediately to Leaves of Grass, which I then understood in a new way. When, at David's suggestion, I read it, I was stunned. A timeline from Walt Whitman’s publication of articles on the history of Brooklyn and New York to his December 1862 move to Washington, D.C. Specimen Days was new to me, since, like most students, I had only heard of Leaves of Grass. While I was making wood engravings, arranging typography, and running presses, David was hunting for neglected gems of American literature. The plan was to issue fine, illustrated letterpress books that we would print ourselves, inspired by Baskin's Gehenna Press.

After being introduced to each other by our mentor Leonard Baskin, David invited me to help him start a private press. Just as I was the product of the undergraduate presses at Yale, David had his start in Ray Nash's Graphic Arts Workshop at Dartmouth. It was also David who invited Alfred Kazin to write his essay. Much of the credit for this remarkable edition of Specimen Days goes to David Godine-who first had the idea, and then paid for it. In addition, the editor of this journal, Ed Folsom, has asked me to tell how I became the owner of a lost photograph of Whitman made in 1889 by Frederick Gutekunst. The following story explains how this improbable event transpired. My name appears in the credit on the copyright page: 'The book was designed, researched and edited by Lance Hidy.'Īs 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 book, which contained a new introduction by Alfred Kazin, received a positive review from Leo Marx in The New York Times Sunday Book Review. The first illustrated edition of Specimen Days by Walt Whitman appeared in 1971, displaying the imprint of David R.