Across the River and Into the Trees. by HEMINGWAY, Ernest - 1950

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,, 1950. Octavo. Original blue buckram, facsimile signature to front board and titles to spine gilt. Containing several textual errors which were corrected to the first trade edition. Housed in a quarter black morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery. A superb copy. First edition, first printing, one of 24 copies specially bound for presentation, printed from the uncorrected sheets. With the author's presentation inscription on the half-title, "To Alfred Rice with all good wishes and affection Ernest Hemingway". Rice was a lawyer based in New York, who specialised in copyright law, and handled all of Hemingway's literary, radio, television and motion picture properties. He began representing Hemingway in 1944, often travelling to Cuba to meet with his client. After the first 24 copies had been run off, a number of errors were caught; these first sheets were not bound for sale but instead bound up in a different cloth to the first edition and given to the author and the publisher for presentation to friends. The bibliographer Grissom records an apocryphal anecdote from David Randall, manager of Scribner's Rare Books Division, who claimed that 25 copies were bound up from the discarded sheets of the entire first edition. Grissom noted that "it would be much more likely that the presentation copies were printed, per usual, as advance copies from the flawed early plates". We have handled a copy in which Scribner's confirmed that the number of copies was in fact 24.