“ONE OF HIS DARKEST STORIES”

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. God Rest You Merry Gentlemen. New York: House of Books Ltd., 1933. Small slim octavo, original red cloth, uncut. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. $1850.

Limited first edition, number 62 of only 300 copies.

This was the first appearance of this story, although it was published with some revisions later the same year in Winner Take Nothing. Hemingway "drew on his remembrances of Kansas City in 1917" in writing this, one of his darkest stories, which "consisted of a conversation between two young ambulance surgeons about the case of a boy who had tried to persuade one of the doctors to castrate him and then mutilated himself with a razor in order to get rid of an 'awful lust' which he took to be a 'sin against purity'" (Baker 227). Hanneman A11a.

Interior fine, some very faint spotting to cloth. A fresh, unworn, near-fine copy, gilt bright.