Enhancing the Walt Whitman Collection

A superb printing of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, produced by the Whitman Archive and McSweeney in 2023 has just been acquired. This new 2 vol set, with its psychedelic slipcase, will be added to the Trimble-Whitman Collection here at Heritage Collections, Dunedin City Library. The Walt Whitman Collection was formed by William Heywood Trimble, first Hocken Librarian and devotee of the poet. The collection he amassed, now sitting with the Reed Collection, is the largest in Australasia.

W. H. Trimble (1860 – 1927), appointed as the first temporary Hocken Librarian for a period of two years, was a keen Whitman scholar. He frequently contributed articles on literary and historical subjects to magazines and newspapers in New Zealand and overseas. He and his wife Annie collected a wide variety of Whitman material including books, pamphlets and photographs. The bulk of their collection was donated to the Dunedin Public Library by their daughter, Dorothy Stewart, after Trimble's death in 1927.

The Walt Whitman Collection comprises more than 680 volumes, including numerous editions of Whitman's classic work Leaves of Grass, from the 1856 second edition to modern publications. One of the most interesting items in the collection is the Concordance of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a typescript in two volumes, compiled by Trimble and his wife, and containing a total of 61,201 entries.

The Whitman Collection is the largest in Australasia and significant internationally.