HEMINGWAY, ERNEST | in our time. Paris: Three Mountain Press, 1924

The Property of a Gentleman

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST

 in our time. Paris: Three Mountain Press, 1924

Small folio. Woodcut portrait of Hemingway after Henry Strater on half-title verso; publisher's device on title. Original collage-decorated tan boards, a fine copy without repairs to the fragile joints and only a trace of the usual rubbing to one lower corner. Blue cloth gilt chemise and slipcase. 

First edition of Hemingway’s second book, limited to 170 copies printed by hand on Rives hand-made paper (this no.81).

in our time, consisting of eighteen short “chapters” or vignettes, was the sixth and final volume in Ezra Pound’s series, “The Inquest into the state of contemporary English prose,” published by the Three Mountains Press; it was scheduled to be the young author's first published book, but the difficulties presented by printing by hand press and with the binder delayed its issue and Three Stories and Ten Poems preceded it. The present is however, the most true introduction of an author who would transform narrative by paring his prose to only the most essential. 

One of the earliest reviews of in our time was by Edmund Wilson, in a joint consideration of Hemingway’s first two books in The Dial (October 1924), later collected in The Shores of Light (1950), pp. 115–124: “... 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 ... And I am inclined to think that this little book has more artistic dignity than any other book that has been written by an American about the period of the war.”

REFERENCE:

Grissom A2; Hanneman A2a; Connolly, The Modern Movement 49