?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 18,000 - $ 25,000
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST. Three Stories & Ten Poems. [10], 58, [4] pp. including blanks. 12mo, (178 x 118 mm), publisher's blue-grey printed wrappers, backstrip darkened with a few chips, rear wrapper partially split neatly along joint, wrapper edges toned; contents show browning to blank margins, rear free endpaper with smudging and short closed tear; Shakespeare and Company/Sylvia Beach bookseller's label tipped to rear; preserved in custom chemise and cloth slipcase with morocco lettering label. Paris: Contact, 1923
first edition of hemingway's first book. ex-collection al hirschfeld. In October 1925 Al Hirschfeld, who was already a veteran of movie studio publicity departments, left for Paris thanks to a five hundred dollar gift from an uncle. "I arrived in Paris and a whole new world opened up to me," recalled Hirschfeld a half century later, "a world of creativity and insanity." "Everybody was writing a great American novel," he remembered. There he met Ernest Hemingway, and though Hirschfeld felt the writer was a "bully", he did buy the writer's first book at Shakespeare and Company. It may have been the first, but certainly not the last time that Hirschfeld recognized that talent and personality were two different things. He would draw Hemingway six times during the 1950s after the writer had become a full-fledged celebrity. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased his 1952 street scene of "Americans in Paris" which featured a portrait of Hemingway for their collection soon after it was drawn. The Harry Ransom Center acquired Hirschfeld's colorful portrait of Hemingway reading Ulysses at the Stork Club, which first appeared on the cover of The American Mercury in November 1950. Hirschfeld's copy includes correspondence from his friend, the legendary radio personality Ben Grauer who spent the last decade of his life collecting information on prices and pricing, with special attention to book prices, for a projected history that was never realized. Grauer and his wife, the celebrated interior designer Melanie Kahane, were in the close circle of Broadway first nighters of which Hirschfeld was a charter member. Limited to 300 copies. Printed at Dijon by Maurice Darantiere, who also printed James Joyce's Ulysses. Hanneman A1.a.
