Hemingway, Ernest

Three Stories & Ten Poems. [Paris]: Contact Publishing Co., 1923.

12mo (7 1 /4 x 4 3/4 ins; 178 x 114 mm). Original printed blue gray wrappers; tiny hole in upper margin, spine a touch worn at bottom with some rubbing and split at head, rear wrapper a little faded, few leaves with faint spotting, blue cloth case with morocco label.

Hanneman A1a (only 300 copies printed).

First edition of the author's first book, inscribed by his supporter, Sylvia Beach on the verso of the rear wrapper "For Emma with love from Sylvia Paris July 31, 1924." 

 Emma is Emma Purcell, who includes along with her pencilled ownership on the front endpaper 'from Slyvia Beach, Shakespeare & Co, Paris." Beach was the owner of the "Shakespeare & Co." bookshop and one of the seminal figures of Postwar Paris, supporting expatriate authors and of course taking on the task of presenting Joyce's Ulysses to the world. Her shop was the epicenter of expatriate Paris, the literary salon for Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the wide circle they attracted.  The young Hemingway haunted her shop virtually daily. "No one that I ever knew was nicer to me" he said of Beach. It was first to her that he read the early stories that appeared here, published by another American who frequented Shakespeare, Robert McAlmon.

Beach records in her memoirs what a stir this small blue book caused, selling out it's modest print run immediately. Though the war led to the shop closing at last in 1941 and Beach's internment, she certainly wasn't forgotten by Hemingway. When he entered Paris in 1944 he made certain to personally liberate "Shakespeare & Co." Their renunion in a crowded Paris street had the neighbors cheering.