In Our Time. by Hemingway, Ernest - 1924

Printed at the Three Mountains Press and for sale at Shakespeare & Company: Paris, 1924. First edition of Hemingway's second published work, one of 170 numbered copies printed on Rives hand-made paper, this is number 90. Quarto, original tan printed boards with black lettering and publisher's device printed over a collage of red-lettered facsimile newspaper items, woodcut frontispiece portrait of Hemingway from a portrait by Henry Strater, all edges uncut. In fine condition. Housed in a custom folding cloth chemise and half morocco slipcase with splitting to the chemise. One of Hemingway's rarest books, second only to Three Stories and Ten Poems both because of the limited number of copies printed and its fragile nature. A superior example. Ezra Pound had arranged with William Bird, the owner of The Three Mountains Press to publish a series of six volumes by contemporary writers, under the collective title 'The Inquest into the State of Contemporary English Prose'. Contributors included Pound himself, Ford Maddox Ford, William Carlos Williams and Ernest Hemingway. For his contribution Hemingway selected the 6 sketches that had already been published in The Little Review in 1924, to which he added a further 12. The resulting publication was titled in our time, an ironic reference to the twelfth line of the Episcopalian Evening Prayer: "Give peace in our time, O Lord". In our time is certainly one of Hemingway's rarest both because of the limited number of copies printed and its fragile nature. A series of short vignettes, the work is a powerful statement on war and includes chapters written during Hemingway's recent visits to Spain and the fictional account of the death of Maera, a renowned matador. In his review in The Dial, October 1924, Edmund Wilson asserted, "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" and called it "a harrowing record of the barbarities of the period in which we live". Ezra Pound edited in our time, and it was later expanded into the American edition of 1925 in which these 18 chapters appeared interspersed among other classic Hemingway short stories.