Walt Whitman Initiative Tane Library

Welcome to the Tane Library!

91 South Street NYC, at Fulton Stall Market

This free, open-access collection is available to the general public thanks to generous donations from supporters of the Walt Whitman Initiative. We invite you to peruse our 600-plus-volume-and-growing library, which includes rare editions and facsimiles — learn about some of our recent acquisitions in the Announcements section! The Whitman Initiative also hosts a lively variety of events at our Tane Library — view snapshots of past Events below!

Curator Jay Sherry

Preview the Collection

Thank you to our partner Fulton Stall Market, a non-profit public farmer’s marketplace responsibly sourcing local products.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Unveiling our first edition copy of Leaves of Grass!

The Walt Whitman Initiative is absolutely thrilled to announce that we are now the guardians of one of the 200 or so copies of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in the world! Through your generous donations, our Tane Library has acquired a precious copy of America’s ‘cultural declaration of independence,’ designed and printed by Walt and his friends Thomas and Andrew Rome in their Brooklyn print shop. It’s a well-loved copy — a “rough” just like its author — and our mission is to make it available to Walt’s beloved multitudes. A Genuine People’s Copy! Please stay tuned as we gather ideas for how to open this book to you! WWI continues to run on love, poetry, and your help: click “Support Us” to “contribute a verse”, fellow traveler!

Camerado, this is no book,

Who touches this, touches a man….

Rare books and materials acquisition!

Thanks to the generosity of Susan Tane and our own Ed Centeno, the Tane Library now holds a third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860) as well as a collection of fourteen valuable Whitman editions and facsimiles.

Leaves of Grass. Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860-61 (second printing, binding B)
Leaves of Grass. Washington DC [London pirated edition], 1872 [but 1873]
Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay [c. 1900]
Leaves of Grass (1855). Portland, ME: Thomas Bird Mosher and William Francis Gale, 1920
Leaves of Grass (1855). NY: Doubleday, 1931
Leaves of Grass (1855). NY: Columbia University Press for the Facsimile Text Society, 1939.
Camden’s Compliment to Walt Whitman. Horace L. Traubel, ed. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1889.
Good-Bye My Fancy. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891
Autobiographia. NY: Charles L. Webster & co., 1892
Selected Poems. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892.
The Wound Dresser. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co,, 1898.
Lafayette in Brooklyn. NY: George D. Smith, 1905
Pictures: An Unpublished Poem of Walt Whitman. NY: The June House, 1927
Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate. NY: Random House, 1929.

Donation of 100+ books!

This generous gift from a private collector is helping us to develop the Tane Library as a treasury for the people of Whitman’s New York! A good number of the volumes in the collection were published or bought in the UK, where Whitman enjoyed a discipleship even during his lifetime. The donation includes: Leaves of Grass deathbed edition(s) and Complete Poetry and Prose (1888; the first book to include a photo as a frontispiece, thanks to new technology); November Boughs and After All No To Create Only, both produced by Walt during his own time; a signed edition of Whitman: The Poet Liberator of Woman; the precious Small Maynard reprinting of Walt and Pete’s “Calamus Letters”; a first edition of Rossetti’s Poems, the first Whitman collection published in the UK; Walt’s Blue Book (facsimile of his own annotated copy of LG 1860, used as his own resource while working on the next edition); an almost complete set of the Camden edition of Putnam’s 1902 Writings of WW; the Peter Pauper Press LG, illustrated by John Curry.