OK.
So here you have the original 1855 edition
of Leaves of Grass.
How many of you guys have actually
seen an original edition of Leaves of Grass?
A couple of you guys?
OK.
You would probably know then that it
doesn't look like a typical 19th century book.
It isn't a stout, small, little rat-killer of a book.
It's more of a folio.
It's a large, expansive, as thin as a wafer.
It looks like he wanted to make a big splash,
and you'd be right to think that Whitman had those ambitions.
I mean, this is the same guy who basically published
all these glowing reviews of his book
when it came out under assumed aliases in different-- yeah,
he pulled a lot of strings when this came out
in a lot of different publications in New York.
So he wasn't above that sort of thing, and neither am I.
[LAUGHTER]
But if you notice, it's a long, broad sort of book.
The reason for this is because the Rome brothers, who
had printed the book, their stock in trade,
what they were mainly known for, was printing legal documents.
And they tend to be a larger sheet, right?
And so Whitman had to reconfigure his poem
to kind of fit that format.
And what a format it is.
I mean, you look at this--
to the 19th century reader, I would
imagine that this doesn't even look like poetry, right?
So you can imagine, just like my book,
it doesn't look like a typical typeset sort of thing.
People are, what the hell is this thing?
It's like, well, I'm following Walt. That's all.
Don't blame me.
Blame Walt.
[LAUGHTER]
But you can see it's a torrent of text.
It's not in stanzas.
It's not in a set sort of line length or anything like that.
It's just sprawling all over the place.
So it's a typographical expression of the themes
that you find in Song of Myself, which
I think is very appropriate.
Now, Whitman apparently had typeset about a third
of the original edition.
This is just rumor.
These are just things that I've been reading.
I don't know how true that is.
But if it is true, then I'm really
following in Whitman's footsteps,
because he too was a graphic designer and maybe even
an illustrator.
There's even some talk about him actually
having done the type on the cover of the book as well.
Now, this also isn't the typical frontispiece portrait
of the author either.
A lot of people at the time were really, really put off by this.
It's the equivalent of today being in a hoodie or something
like that.
He doesn't even have a tie on.
He doesn't have a jacket or anything.
He looks kind of--
well, he just looks like sassy--
sassy, Walt, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
And there's an interesting story behind this actually.
Are there any kids in the room?
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
Quick, cover their ears.
But apparently he stopped the first run in the middle
to have the engraver enhance his nethers, as it were--
as we call it on the East Coast.
No, we don't talk like that on the East Coast.
We would say much something much more crude,
but I'm trying to be genteel.
Yeah.
Actually, because he wanted to exude
an air of robustness and vigor.
Which is a 19th century way of saying,
he wanted to put out the vibe.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, what really got me going with--
how I worked out the look of the text in my book
is I started looking at successive editions of Song
of Myself.
This is the 1860-1861 edition.
This is the other frontispiece.
This is the one where he kind of looks
like Dr. Zaius in his portrait.
I don't know if you've ever seen this one.
He does.
He looks like it's something out of Planet of the Apes.
It's actually-- he's very--
very simian, very strange.
But I saw this type, and I knew that this
was going to kind of provide me with a template,
stylistically, to kind of move forward with it.
I'm also a big fan of 19th century scrimshaw,
and that was also a great influence on me typographcially
as well.
Now, this is my dump.
This is the basement.
I bet you guys weren't expecting carpeting.
[LAUGHTER]
The way I go on about it, I make myself out
to be some sort of Gregorian monk or something.
It's like, no.
I did have about three or four house coats on, and yeah.
But that space over there, the draftboard,
was for sketching and banging my head,
and then I would bring it over here
to tighten up the sketch in Sharpie,
and then finally throw it on a light table
and do the final inking.
And then it would get scanned, and then I
would kind of clean up the image,
and then I would have volumes of these
on my desktop and my computer--
the very same one I have here.
And then I would eventually send them over
to Tin House in batches of 50.
And batches of 50 could take three weeks.
Sometimes it could take three months.
You know, I had to work and keep the lights on in between all
of this, so I did what I could.
There's a closer look.
You can see I had my paperback version of the 1855 edition
up here, and I had it highlighted and all that.
And I had it up there while I was
working so I could ponder and keep
striking my forehead, my beluga-like forehead,
onto the thing.
And I would probably spend about a good five or six
hours every day.
It was probably a 12 to 14-hour workday usually,
and I'd probably spend the first five or six hours just trying
to figure out what I was going to do.
I was going to respond every time.
And I did go chronologically through the poem.
I treated it like a landscape.
So that was very important to me to kind
of progress in sequential order through the poem
and not really look too far ahead.
I mean, I've read it obviously, but I
wanted to kind of put it in the back of my head
and then encounter it as freshly as I could.
Now, you'd be surprised, these suckers are really warm.
I could probably be wearing a bikini down there
and still have that on--
I'd still be fine.
Which brings me to my next picture-- no, I'm kidding.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, this is the edition that I used.
I just like the wavy, gravy, groovy sort
of illustration on that.
I don't know what it is, but that was my way in.
I don't know what it is.
I never picked up a copy of Leaves of Grass,
and then I saw this cover, and then it kind of clicked.
Does anybody else have that?
It was like, oh yeah, that's it-- every man a cosmos, right?
And that's what turned me on to Whitman.
And you can see how I kind of annotated the thing
and broke down the various verse paragraphs into pages--
page spreads, I should say.
Now, originally-- and I'm sorry I'm repeating myself--
I mean, this is unavoidable.
But originally I thought it was going
to be about 120 pages, 150 pages, and so did Tin House.
I was like, yeah, it's 50-60 pages in its original edition.
And then I finally went in there and actually broke everything
down.
Because what you want to do is make sure that each page
spread has a theme, right?
So that way, by the time you're turning the page,
you've kind of expanded that theme,
and you've moved on to the next one.
Otherwise, the entire thing's incoherent.
So in allowing Whitman's words to go to the fore
and determine the amount of pages,
it comes out to 260 pages.
And that went over like a lead balloon at Tin House.
They were not-- they were actually
really very kind about it and all that sort of thing.
I was like, guys, I don't know what--
I mean, there's no way to do it any smaller,
because this is what the poem needs in order to breathe.
And if you haven't noticed, this book
is made from recycled stock, and there's
all kinds of-- we really pulled out the stops for this sucker.
So this was just one more expense.
But you kind of have to go for broke with these things,
so that's what we did.
And also, I color-coded the pages red, green, blue, red,
and there's a galloping palette throughout the whole thing
that kind of holds it.
Because I knew I was really going
to be stylistically all over the place, because Whitman's words
take you all over the place.
And because I knew that I was in for a kitchen sink sort of ride
with Whitman, I knew that I have to have
some graphic elements that will hold the entire thing together.
The chromatic strictness that I used
was kind of like the mortar for the whole thing.
Now, this is one of my first couple failures.
I got Walt wearing lipstick for some reason
here, with antlers on his head.
I don't know.
[LAUGHTER]
It's a lifestyle choice.
I'm not judging.
But yeah, you have these first-- and the first one,
I don't know, it just didn't really get me excited.
The second one was completely off base.
It was too floral.
It looks like Oscar Wilde's Song of Myself, you know?
Yeah, it's just-- it minces too much.
Let's put it that way.
It's just too-- the type is all in ribbons and garlands,
and I'm expecting tambourines and chiffon
to start flying in any moment.
So obviously this isn't the way to go.
So what I did is I kind of re-explored this,
and I just boom.
So I tightened it up, and I simplified it.
And then it clicked.
And just like mom said, the manticore will show the way.
And in this case, it certainly did.
Actually, I always thought of Whitman as an American Sphinx,
you know?
So I decided I'm going to get a sphinx in there.
So I did.