e total number of copies issued is not known but must have been quite
small owing to the effect of the lower priced pirated edition.

The fifth edition was published in Washington and attracted little or no
attention save in England where the demand for complete and unabridged
copies was fostered by Rossetti's emasculated edition. The English
demand was so great that Whitman was compelled to reprint one or two
new editions. He got around the expense of new plates by inserting
"intercallations"--poems printed on separate slips of paper and tipped
in.

In 1881, the next Boston edition was issued. With a recognized publisher
of Osgood's standing there should have been no question of the final
success of "Leaves of Grass." Osgood published all the work of the New
Englanders; Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson and Whittier. Whitman was in
good company save that the Society for the Suppression of Vice
considered "Leaves of Grass" to be bad company and through District
Attorney Stevens secured its suppression. Osgood promptly withdrew the
book and gladly turned over to the author all unsold and unbound copies
and the plates. The plates went to Rees, Welsh and Company, of
Philadelphia, who brought out an edition and then dropped from sight.
David McKay published an edition from the same plates. During this time
certain "special" and "author's" editions were published by Whitman as
his own publisher.

After Whitman's death Small, Maynard & Company, of Boston, became the
authorized publishers. They were followed in turn by D. Appleton and
Company, and Mitchell Kennerley. At this writing Messrs. Doubleday, Page
& Co. are the authorized publishers of "Leaves of Grass," and the
"Prose Works."

Any bibliography of Whitman's Works can be called but an attempt. His
temperamental handling of the plates of the various editions of "Leaves
of Grass" resulted in many curious imprints. There may be omissions, I
grant, but not serious ones. The work I undertook was a clearing up of
the fog which hung about the various Boston editions and setting
cataloguers right on the first edition.

I must, at this point, thank Anne Montgomerie Traubel, of Camden, Mr.
Walter Bartley Quinlan and Mr. Alfred F. Goldsmith, of New York, and Mr.
Henry S. Saunders, of Toronto, Canada, for valuable suggestions and
comparison of notes, and Mr. M. M. Breslow for permission to use his
very excellent collection of Whitmaniana as a basis for this
bibliography.