Whitman, Walt: Earliest Unpublished Notebook, v.1, 23 April 2008
 

This is the earliest of the many small notebooks that Walt Whitman kept. He began writing in it as he conceived of the poems that would become the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. It is one of four notebooks that have survived and been scanned by the Library of Congress. Each is about 120 pages filled with various pencil notations of people he met, debts he owed, but also some ideas and poems.

This 5 Mb ebook contains only the scanned images of the 90 or so intact pages from the notebook which were not blank. I have adjusted the brightness and contrast of each image to make them more readable on eink readers. The original notebook pages were just about the same size as the images as they are displayed on a 6" reader.

EDIT: I've replaced the file with new ones created using Nick's Mob2IMP. There were 58 downloads of the original file.

I have found a site with transcriptions of most of the pages of this notebook displayed alongside each page image:

http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/whitman/index.html

EDIT: I've replaced the file with new ones created using Nick's Mob2IMP. There were 58 downloads of the original file.