Rare Finds - A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” - The Old Man and the Sea. 

While working of this, his last major novel, Hemingway wrote to Scribner, “This is the prose that I have been working for all my life that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man’s spirit. It is as good prose as I can write as of now” (Letters, 738).

Santiago’s epic battle with the marlin and the sharks won Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was instrumental as well in his being awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize. Though one of his most popular, The Old Man and the Sea is one of the most difficult of his books to find signed or inscribed, as he had become increasingly reclusive in his later years.

Faulkner, who reviewed the novel of the magazine Shenandoah, called it Hemingway’s best. “Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us. I mean his and my contemporaries” (Baker, 593-94). We are pleased to offer a fine copy, inscribed by the author, “very gratefully, Ernest Hemingway,” in an exceptional original dust jacket.