The Old Man and the Sea. by HEMINGWAY, Ernest - 1952

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,, 1952. In the bright first issue jacket Octavo. Original light blue calico-grain cloth, spine lettered in silver, author's name to front board in blind. With the pictorial dust jacket. Neat inscription to front free endpaper. Spine lightly rubbed and browned, faint marks to book block edges; a bright, near-fine copy in the fresh jacket with a little creasing to spine ends, a couple of tiny nicks to head of spine, and small patches of glue residue to flaps. First edition, first printing, in the first issue jacket. Hemingway's final work of fiction and among his best-known works, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953, and was cited by the Nobel Committee in their awarding of Hemingway's Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. The first issue jackets have, as here, the flaps printed in brown and no mention of Hemingway's Pulitzer or Nobel Prize to the rear panel. Previously, much has been made of the colour tint on the rear panel portrait by Lee Samuels. Grissom, however, refutes Hanneman's earlier assertion that the blue tinted photograph on the rear panel predates the olive tint, noting, "the identification of a first-printing jacket does not require identifying ambiguous rear-jacket colours: It is the brown printing on the flaps and rear panel that identify the first-printing Scribner's jacket". Grissom A24.1.a; Hanneman 24a.