Guest Blog: Hemingway Association Copy at Auction

Guest Blog by Joe Fay of Heritage Auction Galleries

From the Heritage Bookshelf: Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and an Old?? Spanish Civil War Buddy

Ernest Hemingway was the prototypical man's man. He hunted big game. He punched other writers in bars. He loved a good bull fight. And he ran to wars when most people were running away from them. It was during one of these wars, specifically the Greek-Turkish War in 1922, where Hemingway met Col. Charles Sweeny, another rock-'em-sock-'em alpha male. Charles Sweeny was the perfect type of companion, idol, and perhaps father figure for Hemingway. Legend has it that Sweeny fought in seven wars for five different countries, and knew military history and tactics like no one else Hemingway had ever met before. Hemingway once wrote that Sweeny possessed "one of the most brilliant military brains I have ever known."

The two became fast, close, and lasting friends, and would often see each other in war zones, at the bicycle races in Paris, on hunting expeditions & fishing trips, and later in life, they would sit and trade old war stories and compare their collections of battle scars. Hemingway even used Sweeny as the model for one of his characters in the novel Across the River and into the Trees. The two old war horses spent a lot of time together in Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, where Hemingway drew the inspiration for his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he wrote largely in Cuba in 1939, and was published by Scribner's in 1940.

Hemingway. Sweeny. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Cuba. 1940. All of these bits of information are important to me as I sit at my desk, staring at a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls, affectionately inscribed and signed by Hemingway to Sweeny, with Sweeny's ownership signature dated "Habana, 1940" on the front pastedown. Additionally, Sweeny has inscribed it to a lady friend of his, mentioning Hemingway in the inscription.

It is a rare sight to see such an intimately inscribed Hemingway title with such a personal connection from the author to the receiver. Hemingway writes on the front free endpaper, "For Charley with / the same affection and the / same admiration as always / Ernest." I doubt there were very many men for whom Hemingway would have had both affection and admiration, much less write down for posterity that fact, which makes this book an even more impressive rarity to me.

It's also fascinating to try and connect the dots on an item like this when cataloging it. Just from the information on the book, we can assume that Hemingway gave the book to Sweeny in Cuba in the year of publication, where Sweeny wrote his name, the place, and date inside. Sweeny was probably in Cuba specifically to see Hemingway, presumably to motor out into the Gulf of Mexico and pull some Marlin out of the deep blue sea. Or perhaps Sweeny was on his way to another battlefield, and simply stopped off at Hemingway's house for a shot of tequila.

I've had an absolute blast researching the connection between Hemingway and Sweeny, and have come to think of the book as mine in a certain way. That always happens with a few books in every auction. You spend so much time and effort discovering new information (at least new to you) about some of the books that you can't help falling in love with some of them. Alas, every love story ends. The book will soon leave our hands here at Heritage. It is lot 36506 in our Rare Books Auction #6048 in Beverly Hills, October 14-16. It was a pleasure to live with for awhile, and I will miss it. Much like Sweeny missed Hemingway after the latter's suicide in 1961, when the ole colonel was an honorary pallbearer at the great author's (and better friend's) funeral.

This article (and image) appears in Heritage's September Historic News e-newsletter (vol. 6, no. 9). Reposted with permission of the author. Thank you, Joe!

association copy, book auction, charles sweeny, ernest hemingway, heritage auctions, inscribed edition, joe fay, signed edition, spanish civil war
A Pair of Keepers

I am delighted to report the publication of two books that I have been eager for some time to see appear between hard covers, having had the opportunity to know a bit about them beforehand, and to have had communication with each of the authors as they were works-in-progress. Happily, they are everything I expected they would be, gracefully written in both instances, wisely reasoned, and a genuine pleasure to read.

Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers; Harper, 267 pages, $24.99. 

A former staff writer and media critic for the Washington Post, William Powers has written extensively on every manner of communications technology, developing the premise of this book--and coming up with the splendid title--while a Fellow at Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press in 2006. Powers is exceedingly savvy when it comes to navigating his way about the digital world, and while he is not about to abandon its wondrous applications in any way, shape, or form, he has chosen to step back a bit, take a deep breath, and pay attention to the wisdom of our cultural forebears. "The interior struggle" of "information overload," he writes--the phrase was presciently coined in the 1970s by Alvin Toffler--"is having a dramatic impact in our personal and family relationships." Constant connectivity with the entire world--text messages, cellphones, video streams--leads him to ask the fundamental question: "What is the point anyway?" This is neither a preachy polemic nor a boring diatribe, and while he calls on Plato, Shakespeare, Thoreau, and others for guidance, he does so with style, humility and elan. "Every space is what you make it," he concludes. "But in the end, building a good life isn't about where you are. It's about how you decide to think and live. Place your index finger on your temple and tap twice. It's all in there." Links to various reviews and broadcast interviews are available on Powers' website.

The Groaning Shelf and Other Instances of Book Love, by Pradeep Sebastian; Hachette India, 295 pages, 12.99 GBP ($20 US). 

A well-known literary columnist in India whose many pieces for major publications are available on the Internet, Pradeep Sebastian has entered the books about books genre in impressive fashion, with a very nice collection of his erudite pieces on a striking variety of subjects, many of them previously published in different form, though a few--including a generous profile of yours truly he calls "The Collector of Collectors"--appearing here for the first time. How can a reader of the Fine Books blog not be simpatico with someone who makes this admission: "Holding a book but not actually reading it gave me time (and put me in the mood) to reflect on the act of reading and the physicality of the book; the book as material object." Or someone whose favorite Sunday afternoon ritual is take volumes off his groaning shelves and rearrange them in a new order? "Should I abandon the by-author arrangement and categorize them by subject matter?" Very heavy concerns, indeed. The book has just been released by the India division of Hachette, parent company of Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt. It should be available in U.S. outlets shortly; for now it can be ordered through Amazon.UK.

Hamlet's Blackberry, Nick's Picks, Pradeep Sebastian, The Groaning Shelf, William Powers
No One Knows My Name

Of the dozens of titles on my bookshelves that deal with great book collectors of the past, not one deals exclusively with great women book collectors. 

I find this puzzling.  Certainly there is no lack of great femmes bibliophiles about which an author could write.  Aside from the well-known aristocratic and royal women book collectors of centuries past (Margaret of Flanders, Jeanne de Laval, Catherine de' Medici, Frances Egerton, etc.), there are any number of other women who also have been great book collectors.  Within our own day, Estelle Doheny and Mary Eccles come immediately to mind.  As does Carol Fitzgerald.
 
And Olive Percival.
 
Who?
 
Few modern book collectors are likely to be familiar with Olive Percival, even though her collection of children's books is one of the foundation collections of UCLA's own notable collection of such books.  In truth, it is only through a serendipitous encounter with Ingrid Johnson's MA thesis about Percival that your correspondent became acquainted with this extraordinary woman.
 
Olive May Graves Percival was born in a log cabin in 1868 in Sheffield, Illinois.  In 1887, she and her mother moved to Los Angeles, where Olive later became prominent (as a "writer, photographer, gardener, artist, and bibliophile") in the so-called Arroyo Culture, a southern California branch of the Arts & Crafts movement.  Although employed as a lowly insurance clerk for over three decades, her income--supplemented by the occasional published article or book--was sufficient for her to amass a private library in excess of 10,000 volumes.
 
Lawrence Clark Powell, no mean collector himself, commented that [i]n spite of an income limited to her clerk's earnings and from the occasional sale of articles, this woman...collected beautiful things so assiduously that, after her death, it took an appraiser two weeks to inventory the contents of her cottage.... What a pity that she lacked the wealth and the leisure of a Huntington or a Morgan.
 
An even greater pity was the lack of respect accorded Percival's collection after her death in 1945.  Her entire library was sold for an outrageously paltry sum.  Because the bookseller who bought the collection thought its children's books (527 volumes) would make a nice benefaction for his son's alma mater, UCLA wound up with a truly remarkable foundational collection.  (Some 20% of the titles--the publication dates range from 1707-1914--are chapbooks.)
 
Percival did not collect only books on her insurance clerk's income.  She also collected "hats, dolls, daguerreotypes, silver, textiles, quilts, fans, bookplates, Lalique, and Oriental art."  In many ways, she very much lived the credo of the Arts and Crafts movement, as she herself noted in a diary entry: [s]ometime we shall perceive the need of a fitting background for everyday life and be willing to devote as much time to the intelligent arrangement and management of the place we call home as is given without a protest to bridge or the last best-seller or embroidery or the planning of some self adornment....
 
I have been able to locate only two books that Percival published during her lifetime--Mexico City: An Idler's Notebook (1901) and Leaf shadows and rose-drift: being little songs from a Los Angeles garden (1911).  (Two more books were published posthumously--Yellowing Ivy [1946] and Our Old-Fashioned Flowers [1947].  Most of Percival's published works were articles for periodicals, although she also occasionally penned stories for books like From the Old Pueblo and Other Tales.)
 
In 2005, Percival's manuscript The Children's Garden Book (depicted above) was published as part of The Huntington Library Garden Series.  The Huntington Library holds "Percival's diaries, more than 700 of her photographs, and three book manuscripts...."
book collecting, book collector, book history, books, home library, private library
Hesketh's High Spots Go to Auction
Audubon_431.jpg
Yesterday Sotheby's London announced some of the high spots of its December sale of Lord Hesketh's high spots. Audubon's Birds of America, the first folio of Shakespeare, William Caxton's Polychronicon, letters signed by Queen Elizabeth I, and original drawings from Redoute's Les Roses. From the press release: "The majority of the works in the sale were acquired by Frederick, 2nd Baron Hesketh (1916-1955), who bought them in a golden age of book collecting, when, paradoxically, great rarities seemed almost commonplace." There's also a nice write-up in the Guardian ("World's most expensive book comes up for sale") in which it is estimated that the sale will bring in a total of 8 million-10 million pounds ($12-15 million).  
birds of america, book auction, book collecting, early printed books, first folio, les roses, lord hesketh, queen elizabeth, rare books, sotheby's, william caxton
So long, OED
oed.jpg
Last week, Oxford University Press announced that the upcoming third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary will only go to press "if there is enough demand for the printed volume when it becomes ready," reported the AP. Otherwise, it shall dwell somewhere in the Internet ether. Lest you think that I'm going to write its obit. here (there's a lovely one on the New Yorker blog already), I'm merely positing a question: is the OED now a collectible? Dictionaries are quite desirable -- in our current summer quarterly, we interview author Ammon Shea about his lexicography collection (he found a 1933 OED set for $200 at a used bookstore), and several years back, Nick Basbanes wrote a profile of dictionary collector Breon Mitchell. 
ammon shea, book collecting, book collector, breon mitchell, dictionary collector, oxford english dictionary, oxford university press
Washington's Will in Worcester
Andrew_Haswell_Green.jpg
The Boston Globe ran a great preview of a big auction coming up this week in Worcester, Massachusetts. The four-day sale, beginning on Sept. 9, will disperse the collection of Andrew H. Green (pictured here), born in Worcester in 1820, but who became known as the "father of greater New York" for his achievements as a city planner and civic leader. Among the 2,000+ lots containing dolls, games, silver, paper money, stamps, coins, and paintings, are early presidential letters and a copy of Washington's will printed by Isaiah Thomas in 1800. Auctioneer R.W. Oliver has all of the catalogues online for perusal. As the article in the Globe points out, "From Green's death in 1903 until 2009, virtually none of the items had ever been uncrated and examined. Packing boxes sealed more than a century ago were opened only after the death last summer of Julia Green, his great-great-grandniece and distant heiress." So these items are on the block for the first time in more than a century, if ever. It certainly fuels the fantasy that great books, documents, and collectibles are still hidden in attics, waiting for us to find them. 
andrew h. green, andrew haswell green, book auction, boston globe, george washington, isaiah thomas, julia green, presidential letters, r.w. oliver, worcester
According to Cocker

Bywords, according to one definition, are proverbial sayings that express some important fact of experience that is taken as true by many people.  For example: had you lived in the 17th-18th centuries, and you had wanted to convey the idea that something was "absolutely correct" or "according to the rules," you might well have ended your assertion with the phrase "according to Cocker."

What "important fact of experience," "taken as true by many people," would have led you to end your assertion with this phrase?
 
Edward Cocker (1631-1675) was an English engraver, writing master and mathematician whose magnum opus, Cocker's Arithmetick, was published posthumously in 1677.  Over the next 150 or so years, this title (which contains the earliest known use of the concept of lowest terms) educated generations of British schoolchildren.  (The volume depicted below is the 33rd Edition of 1715, from the collection of Augustus De Morgan held by the Senate House Library at the University of London:)

Much of this title's popularity and influence is attributed to the fact that it excluded all demonstrations and reasoning, and confined itself to commercial questions only.  It is to the presumed accuracy of Cocker in resolving commercial mathematical questions (since disputed) that the phrase "according to Cocker" arose as a byword for "absolutely correct."

Samuel Johnson carried a copy of Cocker's Arithmetick on his travels about Scotland, and the book was widely used in colonial America, not least by folks like Benjamin Franklin.  It would be an interesting collecting challenge to try and obtain as many editions of this title as possible, although several editions (DNB suggests at least 112 editions may have been published altogether) do not appear to have survived in even a single copy.  As a grammar schoolbook subjected to generations of hard use, this is to be expected. Makes the challenge more interesting...no?
book collecting, book collector, book history, books, home library, private library
The Nature of Printing Money

Earlier this week, the exhibition Money on Paper opened at Princeton University. Looking at bank notes as an art form, curator of numismatics Alan Stahl puts on display several treasures, including the recently discovered bank note engraving of a grouse by John James Audubon. The 1763 New Jersey shilling seen here (printed by James Parker of Woodbridge, courtesy of Princeton University) is one of the fascinating examples of nature printing in the exhibit. According to the exhibition's website, "the most inventive printer of paper money of the time was Benjamin Franklin, who devised a system of transferring the vein patterns of tree leaves to printing plates to foil counterfeiters. The Princeton exhibition includes a large selection of Franklin's nature-print notes." Reading this prompted me to reach for a new book I recently received from Mark Batty Publishers -- Impressions of Nature: A History of Nature Printing by Roderick Cave (mbp, $85).

There are several pages devoted to nature printing techniques in colonial America with examples of bank notes. Cave writes, "Franklin adopted various devices such as the use of paper incorporating flecks of mica, or pieces of coloured thread -- methods still sometimes used by securities' printers -- but in the adoption of nature printing he was unique."

Impressions of Nature is a beautiful book, brimming with full-color illustrations. Cave impressively relays the early history of nature printing, its spread through Europe, the work of major printers, and its applications in photography and graphic design. There seems to be something for everyone in this splendid volume.

alan stahl, banknote, benjamin franklin, impressions of nature, john james audubon, mark batty publishers, nature printing, numismatics, paper currency, princeton university, printing history, roderick cave