Once, Paumanok!

We're going off-topic with this post, since it has nothing to do either with historic preservation or with Park Slope. But, if one spends enough time in the Brooklyn Eagle, that telescope into the past, one finds some really cool stuff...

Like this 1855 advertisement for the self-published first edition of "Leaves of Grass":

Brooklyn Eagle, June 29, 1855, p. 3

A few weeks later, the Eagle published a review of this "extraordinary book":

Brooklyn Eagle, September 15, 1855, p. 2

We have a dim recollection of our American Lit professor saying that Whitman wrote anonymous (and approving) reviews of his own book. It's hard to tell because of the florid 19th-century style, but one can almost imagine that these could be Whitman's own words:

One could certainly do worse than to "loafe" a while amongst Whitman's Leaves of Grass.