Desirable unsigned book: The Old Man and the Sea. First edition, first printing (with “A” and Scribner’s seal on copyright page); in original dust jacket (with $3.00 price intact). NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952. Hardcover with dust jacket, 5.75 x 8.25, 140 pages. Book condition: VG-/VG, with toned adhesive remnants to endpapers (bleeding through to half-title page), staining to bumped corners, and chips and wear to spine ends of the book and dust jacket. Accompanied by a framed issue of the September 1, 1952 issue of Life Magazine, in which The Old Man and the Sea was first published. Written during a two-month span in 1951, The Old Man and the Sea was published in a limited run of 50,000 copies in September of 1952. In conjunction with its wildly popular publication in Life Magazine, the novella earned immediate critical and commercial success, reaffirming Hemingway’s place as a novelist, and subsequently rewarding him with both the Pulitzer and Nobel Peace Prize. A definitive piece of the American literary canon.
