[Literature] Hemingway, Ernest in our time"If with your signature I should value it more"Ernest Hemingway's Presentation Copy of the Rare 1924 Edition of "in our time" Inscribed to Maxwell Perkins, Marking the Beginning of One of the 20th Century's Most Legendary Literary RelationsParis: Printed at the Three Mountains Press and for sale at Shakespeare &pany, 1924. Tall 8vo. 30, (2) pp. First and very limited edition, #8/170 numbered copies, printed on Rives hand-made paper. An important association copy, signed and inscribed by Hemingway on front free endpaper to his soon-to-be editor at Charles Scribner's Sons, Maxwell Perkins, ca. June 1925: "For Maxwell E. Perkins / With very best wishes / from Ernest Hemingway / Paris 1925." Illustrated with a woodcut frontispiece portrait of Hemingway by Henry Strater. Original tan paper-covered boards, printed in black and in red, lower spine starting, scattered dampstaining to front board, scattered wear to extremities; all edges untrimmed; typical discoloration to endpapers; ink stain at bottom of frontispiece. A very well-preserved andpletely unsophisticated copy. Hanneman A2.A; Cohn pp. 16-18Perhaps the most consequential association copy of any Hemingway title: the author's presentation of his first collection of short stories to his future editor at Scribner's, the legendary Maxwell Perkins (1884-1947). The two had begun a professional court just eight weeks earlier, which not only would lead eight months later to the genesis of one of American literature's most significant editorial relations, but also last until Perkins' death in 1947, and result in the publication of Hemingway's most enduring works, including The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).Perkins is celebrated for his discovery and editor of authors such as Thomas Wolfe, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it was Fitzgerald who first rmended Hemingway to Perkins in an October 10, 1924 letter writing of a "young man named Ernest Hemmingway (sic), who lives in Paris, (an American) writes for the Transatlantic Review + has a brilliant future. Ezra Pound published a collection of his short pieces in Paris.... I'd look him up right away. He's the real thing." (1)That "collection of his short pieces" was in our time, first published in March 1924 by Three Mountains Press, in Paris, in a small run of just 170 copies. It was the seventh, and final, installment of The Inquest into the State of Contemporary English Prose, a series of short novels by contemporary writers, edited by Pound. The book was not available in the United States, and Perkins spent the next few weeks laboriously tracking one down, finally securing one in Paris after great difficulty, which he had ped to him in New York in December.When Perkins finally read the book in February 1925, he was impressed, and immediately sent off an introductory letter to Hemingway, wri