There is probably a good reason Ernest Hemingway is known for his novels, short stories and journalism rather than his poetry, and it can be found in a remarkable first edition of his first American book. Clearly, he was not a great poet.
Hemingway scribbled two poems — unpublishable at the time because of their rudeness — in the 1925 first edition of In Our Time for his lifelong friend and drinking buddy Jack Cowles. The volume’s current owner, Mark Hime, said: ”We’re not talking TS Eliot here.”
The inscribed book shines a light on how Hemingway, who suffered depression throughout his life, was feeling at the time and also makes clear his disdain at being edited: he has handwritten all the original words in the short story collection changed by his US publishers.
The book is heading to London as one of the most eye-catching attractions of this weekend’s antiquarian book fair at Olympia, where more than 160 booksellers offer the chance to pick up rare editions of everything from the Aeneid to Harry Potter.
Hemingway was obviously delighted at having In Our Time published in the United States, and Cowles was one of his closest friends. He wrote: ”To Jack Cowles on Valentine’s Day (this has no sexual significance) Ernest Hemingway.”
Above the inscription Hemingway has drawn a pierced bleeding heart with an arrow pointing to drops of blood and annotated it: ”blood ($2,00 worth)”.
In the back of the book, on two of the blank endpapers, are the poems. One is a humorous defence of the ”lost generation”, the name given by Gertrude Stein to the expatriate American writers living in Paris in the 1920s who met up in the bars and cafés to drink and set the world to rights.
By some accounts it sounds like one long party as the likes of Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound lived it up in Montparnasse. The poem is called The Age Demanded. The second poem is called The Earnest Liberal’s Lament and disparages St Valentine’s Day.
Elsewhere, Hemingway has changed the text where his publishers have decided his original words — mostly about trying to make a baby — go too far.
Hime, who owns California-based bookseller Biblioctopus, is selling the edition for £75 000. He agreed the poetry was not great but said the first edition was remarkable. ”There is nothing like this, even in the Kennedy Library: Hemingway didn’t do this sort of thing. I’ve seen lots of inscribed books but nothing with this much in it.
”I think at the time Hemingway was feeling really good, he was back with his friends, he was having a good time, he’s having a book published in America, he thinks he’s going to be famous and he’s just excited.”
This year’s fair will also feature the only surviving copy of Shelley’s Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, printed in Oxford in 1811, which was written to raise money for the Irish journalist Peter Finnerty. There will also be rare photographs on sale, including ones which capture an encounter with Australian Aborigines in 1891. – guardian.co.uk Â