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PRESENTATION COPY OF HEMINGWAY’S FIRST NOVEL
49. The Torrents Of Spring A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race HEMINGWAY, Ernest
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926. First edition. Original black cloth lettered in red, in picto- rial dustwrapper. Author’s presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper for Ed- ward W. Titus, “To Edward W. Titus / as a souvenir of a very sporting act performed by the said E. W. Titus in the city of Paris. September 17 - 1931 - / from his friend / Ernest Hemingway.” A fine copy in a very good dustwrapper indeed, slightly tanned to the spine with light wear to the spine ends and corners and a small chip to the base of the spine. [45458] £37,500 Edward Titus was an important figure in expatriate Paris, owning the Montparnasse bookshop, which operated from 1924 to 1932. His Black Manikin Press published novels by Djuna Barnes and Mary Butts, the first trade edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and English translations of Baude- laire’s poems and Kiki’s memoirs. The latter was issued with an introduction by Hemingway, in which he declares the publication to mark the end of “the era of Montparnasse”. Titus collected a substantial library for which he issued a catalogue in 1932 and which was dispersed in 1951, shortly before his death. Written in only ten days, The Torrents of Spring was a satirical treatment of the style of writers of the day. It was turned down by Horace Liveright, who claimed that it was unpublishable because “it is such a bitter, and I might say almost vicious caricature” of Sherwood Anderson and his novel Dark Laughter (1925). The rejection prompted Hemingway to offer the manuscript to Max Perkins at Scribner’s, which would remain his publisher for the rest of his life. Scribners issued the first edition in May 1926 in a print run of 1,250 copies. Fitzgerald referred to it as “the best comic book ever written by an American.”
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