![]() Contemporaneous readers would have instantly recognized that curious pointing hand as a manicule or printer’s fist, an icon with deep ties to both manuscript culture and the world of commercial advertising. Nowhere is that affinity more pronounced than in the visual symbol Whitman used to represent his revolutionary poetics within the third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860): a butterfly perched on an outstretched index finger. While a number of vocal literary figures perceived the encroachment of advertising, tainted by its ties to patent medicine fraud, as anathema to the genteel world of letters, Walt Whitman eagerly embraced its promotional potential. ![]() 54–86)Īt the intersection of the professional author’s ascent in the United States and the growing centralization and sophistication of the advertising trade, a new anxiety surfaces in the world of nineteenth-century American publishing: how best to sell the literary text and, in turn, market its author. Eric Conrad, “The Poet as Printer’s Fist: Walt Whitman’s Indicative Hand” (pp.
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