Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island and educated in Brooklyn, NY. He served as a printer's devil, journeyman compositor, and itinerant schoolteacher, edited the Long Islander, and in 1846 became editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, a position from which he was discharged for political reasons. After a period in New Orleans, considered seminal in shaping his philosophy, he returned to Brooklyn. Although he had earlier affected the mien of a dandy, he now dressed as a "rough," and became prominent among the bohemian element of New York. In 1855 he published the first of many editions of Leaves of Grass. The Civil War found him working as an unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers in army hospitals in Washington D.C. After the war he became a clerk in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior, from which he was shortly dismissed by the Secretary on the grounds that LEAVES OF GRASS was an immoral book. During his last nineteen years he lived in Camden, New Jersey. Among his works are Drum-Taps (1865), Democratic Vistas and Passage to India (1871), and Specimen Days (1882).

Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, typographer, and web designer. She currently serves on the Type Directors Club board of directors, has been named a Forbes Magazine 30 under 30 in art and design as well as an ADC Young Gun and one of Print Magazine's New Visual Artists. She has designed for Wes Anderson, McSweeney's, Tiffany & Co, Penguin Books and many others. She resides primarily in San Francisco, occasionally in Brooklyn.