(London: The Nonesuch Press, 1938).

VERY HANDSOME COPY OF THE FIRST NONESUCH WHITMAN IN A SELDOM ENCOUNTERED FINE BINDING. The text includes all the poems known down to date and adds the uncollected and rejected poems. In addition, over 300 pages of prose works have been included and a substantial body of the letters including many to his family and literary contemporaries. Holloway has added a preface and a substantial biographical and bibliographical chronology, but he considered the great worth of his work to be that he had created a compendious edition of Whitman’s work, needed because Whitman did in fact contain “multitudes and was, himself, like his nation, constantly growing...” The COMPLETE WRITINGS, issued by Whitman’s literary executors in 1902 was hardly complete, and so this volume to gather the “great mass of poetry and prose important to...tracing the evolution of America’s great poet...”
Copies of the first Nonesuch Edition are surprisingly rare, and due to the paper standards of the late 1930s are exceptionally so in this condition. Item #30005

First edition, first issue by the Nonesuch Press. Illustrated title-page. Thick 8vo, very handsomely bound in full green morocco by Bayntun-Riviere of Bath, the spine with raised bands, the compartments with central gilt tool, one compartment lettered in gilt, marbled endleaves, all edges gilt. xxxix, 1116 pp. A fine copy in excellent condition, extremely fresh for Depression era paper, the binding very well prserved with only very light mellowing to the green of the spine.