in our time

Paris: Printed at the Three Mountains Press and for sale at Shakespeare & Company [/] London: William Jackson, 1924.. 30,[2]pp. Small quarto (26.5 x 17 cm). Decorated boards, printed in black and red. Frontis portrait by Henry Strater. Inevitable tan offsetting to endsheets from the binder's glue, minuscule losses at extreme crown and toe of spine, a bit of light rubbing, but a very good copy, rather above the norm, with the small Shakespeare & Company book label on the rear pastedown. Cloth slipcase and chemise (with sunning to the spine and some discoloration to the lower panel). First edition of Hemingway's second book, published as the sixth and final title in Ezra Pound's Inquest Series. This is copy number 71 of 170 numbered copies printed on Rives handmade paper, from a total printing of approximately 300 copies. Grissom records sources indicating that in addition to the 170 numbered copies offered for sale, the additional 130 copies were marred by an imperfect placement of the frontis image over the watermark in the paper and were thus utilized as review and gift copies. This is an excellent association copy, bearing the early ink ownership signature of African American poet, novelist and journalist Claude McKay toward the top edge of the half-title (the recto of the leaf bearing the frontis). In his 1937 autobiography, A LONG WAY FROM HOME, McKay records at length his impressions of Hemingway in Paris, and singles out this book in particular for recognition: "Ernest Hemingway was the most talked-about of young American writers when I arrived in Paris. He was the white hope of the ultra-sophisticates ... It was therefore exciting that Ernest Hemingway had won the regard and respect of the younger artists and even of the older ... In Our Time, that thin rare book of miniature short stories, was published, and it was the literary event among the young expatriates. I cherish an unforgettable memory of it and of Montparnasse at that time ... I was excited by the meteor apparition of Ernest Hemingway. I cannot imagine any ambitious young writer of that time who was not fascinated in the beginning. In Paris and in the Midi, I met a few fellows of the extreme left school, and also a few of the moderate liberal school and even some of the ancient fossil school - and all mentioned Hemingway with admiration. Many of them felt that they could never go on writing as before after Hemingway ... In Our Time contains the frame, the background, the substance of all of Hemingway's later work ... I find in Hemingway's works an artistic illumination of a certain quality of American civilization that is not to be found in any other distinguished American writer ... All I can say is that in literature he has most excellently quickened and enlarged my experience of social life" - "Berlin and Paris," Chapter XXI, pp.237-52. GRISSOM A.2.1.a. HANNEMAN A2. MODERN MOVEMENT 49.