Dear Readers,
A few years ago, when my godson was graduating from high school, I went looking for a suitably impressive of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I thought a well-made hardcover edition would make a great gift, given that Leaves of Grass is the closest thing we have to American scripture. But when I looked around, I found nothing like what I wanted. There were paperbacks, there were older hardcovers, but there were no handsome new editions featuring the whole poem, well-presented and made to last.
So at McSweeney’s, we started looking into putting out our own edition. Because we wanted it to be scholarly and definitive, we got in touch with the Walt Whitman Archive, who became our valued partners in the endeavor. With their help, we began plans to feature not only the entirety of Whitman’s final, deathbed-approved edition in hardcover, but also a second volume featuring his drafts, sketches, edits and ephemera. In choosing this material, we were aided greatly by noted scholar Rachel Heise Bolten and McSweeney’s poetry editor Jesse Nathan.
We asked the great Jessica Hische to render the exterior typography, and Angel Chang provided the dizzyingly intricate artwork that adorns the slipcase. On our staff, Sunra Thompson and Annie Dills spent hundreds of hours perfecting the poem’s type and the book’s packaging, seeking to make it sing with full throat and in full color again. Every notebook page is photographed in full color, bringing Whitman’s beautiful handwriting to life. Overall, you’ll see that our edition does not look like some dusty, leathery brown-on-tan edition. Instead, it hews closer to the technicolor explosion of Whitman’s life and work. We sought to take Leaves of Grass from its origins in the nineteenth century and catapult it into the twenty-first century, where it’s still radically, impossibly relevant. We are very proud of how it turned out, and think you’ll like it too.
— Dave Eggers
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you have a god-kid in your life, or a graduate of any kind, this is a very good gift. And it’s priced reasonably, we think. You can order it here. Read more about this deluxe edition in Print magazine.