Hemingway, Ernest | in our time, first edition of Hemingway’s second book - photo 1
Hemingway, Ernest | in our time, first edition of Hemingway’s second book - photo 2
Hemingway, Ernest | in our time, first edition of Hemingway’s second book - photo 3
Hemingway, Ernest | in our time, first edition of Hemingway’s second book - photo 4

Hemingway, Ernest | in our time, first edition of Hemingway’s second book

Lot 20
08.12.2023 12:00UTC -05:00
Classic
Starting price
$ 30 000
AuctioneerSotheby´s
Event locationUSA, New York
Archive
The auction is completed. No bids can be placed anymore.
Archive
ID 1105467
Lot 20 | Hemingway, Ernest | in our time, first edition of Hemingway’s second book
Estimate value
$ 30 000 – 50 000
Hemingway, Ernest
in our time. Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924

Small folio. Woodcut frontispiece of the author after Henry Strater, original printed boards with red and black typography in a Modernist design, untrimmed; very minor rubbing to spine, a little more so at tail, corners just a bit bumped, minor splitting starting between gatherings at gutter, usual light browning to endpapers, but a much better copy than often found. Old cloth chemise and slipcase.

"A form of his own…" First edition of Hemingway’s second book, limited to 170 numbered copies printed on Rives paper (this is copy 46).

Having met Hemingway in February 1922, the American poet Ezra Pound quickly became one of the young author's more influential mentors. When Pound devised his "Inquest into the state of contemporary English prose," he selected Hemingway as one of the six writers whose work would be issued under his "editorial direction" at Three Mountains Press, before Hemingway had apparently even settled on a title: a broadside printed to announce the series lists his contribution as "BLANK by Ernest M. Hemingway." "Pound," writes Jeffrey Meyers in his biography of Hemingway, was "the first significant writer to recognise Hemingway's talent [and] did everything possible to help him achieve success" (Hemingway: A Biography (1985), p.73).

The first six chapters of in our time had first been published in The Little Review in the Spring 1923 issue. The twelve additional sketches were written in "a concentrated spurt of creativity" (ibid, p.141) over the last weeks of the same summer. Compiled in one slim volume of only 170 copies, the work's originality of form and content quickly brought Hemingway to significant critical attention. Contemporary reviews included that of Marjorie Reid for the Transatlantic Review (the same April 1924 issue in which the first excerpt of what would become Joyce's Finnegan's Wake was published); Reid's review read: "[Hemingway] projects the moments when life is condensed and clean-cut and significant, presenting them in minute narratives that eliminate every useless word. Each tale is much longer that the measure of its lines..."

"...in the dry compressed little vignettes of in our time [Hemingway] has almost invented a form of his own... and below its cool objective manner really constitutes a harrowing record of barbarities: you have not only political executions, but criminal hangings, bullfights, assassinations by the police, and all the cruelties and enormities of the war..." (critic Edmund Wilson in his October 1924 Dial review).
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