Description
Presentation copy of the limited edition of in our time by Ernest Hemingway, inscribed to his childhood friend Lewis “Lewy” Clarahan of Oak Park.
Octavo, [8], 9-30pp, [2]. Tan boards, lettering in black, decorated with collage of red lettered newspaper headlines. All edges untrimmed. Printed on Rives handmade paper. From a limited edition of 170 copies issued by the publisher, this is hand-numbered 158. Woodcut frontispiece portrait of Hemingway by Henry Strater. (Hanneman A2a). Housed in a custom black cloth chemise, title in gilt on label affixed to spine. Includes the bookplate of Chicago publisher Donald S. Friede, designed and illustrated by Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias.
This copy is inscribed on the front endpaper: “To Lewy with love from the Author. Paris, March, 1924.”
Lewis “Lewy” Clarahan was a close childhood friend of Ernest “Ernie” Hemingway. The two attended high school together in Oak Park, Illinois and explored Northern Michigan on holidays. They bonded over their love of hunting, which, on one occasion almost cost Clarahan his life when Hemingway accidentally discharged his shotgun next to Clarahan’s head. They often traveled to the Hemingway’s family cottage (Windemere) on Walloon Lake, to spend the summer months fishing and hunting.
Clarahan had the unique distinction of reading one of Hemingway’s first stories, when “…he pulled the last sheet out of his typewriter and read the story he’d written. He was very sure he’d written a real good story. That might have been his very first.” (The Pantagraph, June 1992)
After World War I, the two friends grew apart, with Clarahan believing that Hemingway “was always thinking of what to do next, and where the excitement was. That was his way.” While Hemingway often featured people from his youth in his novels in unflattering ways, he never featured Clarahan, “which may have been his way of showing loyalty to his boyhood friend.” (Pantagraph, 1992) Clarahan died in 1994 at the age of 96.
Ernest Hemingway’s second book, “in our time,” was first printed in Paris, 1924. The collection of short stories center around his visit to Spain the previous summer, along with other experimental narratives to take the place of manuscripts lost by his wife in 1922. New owner and editor of the Three Mountain Press, Billy Bird, wrote to Hemingway that “I am going to pull something really fancy with your book,” which yielded the copy seen here. To align with Hemingway’s experimental writing, the covers were decorated with newspaper headlines and the title was written in lower case letters. The “lack of capital letters” was a challenge for Hemingway, who wrote “I thought he [Bird] could go ahead and be a damn fool in his own way if it pleased him. So long as he did not fool with the text.” (Cohen 48-50)
The Press originally set out to make 300 copies, but a printing error with the frontispiece reduced the total to 170, with faulty copies sent to reviewers (Baker 18). Multiple elements were changed for the 1925 New York publication, including the capitalization of the title and the contents of the volume itself.
