For Whom the Bell Tolls by HEMINGWAY, ERNEST - 1940

New York: Scribners, 1940. Second printing. Signed presentation copy from Ernest Hemingway to his close childhood friend, Bill Smith. Inscribed in black fountain pen ink using Hemingway’s boyhood nickname: “To Bill, with much affection, Wemedge”. Bill and his sister Katy (later married to John Dos Passos), summered near the Hemingway home on Horton Bay, Michigan. Ernest and Bill knew each other for many years as children before becoming close friends: “It took an old pal of mine, Carl Edgar”, Smith recalled, “and most of the summer to put Ernest and me on really good terms.” In less than a few weeks, the three were out at the Point fishing from the dock, day and night. Smith in short order, acquired a full quota of the nicknames that Hemingway invented for friends...while Hemingway, for inexplicable reasons, preferred to be called Wemedge.” See James R. Mellow - Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, pages 37-38, Hemingway who entertained fantasies that Katy Smith was secretly attracted to him, would later create a fictional erotic relationship between the two in the “Nick Adams” stories. Adams’s nickname, in the largely autobiographical series, is Wemedge. Laid into the book is an original small photograph of Hemingway and Bill Smith fishing off the Key West in the 1930s, which was reproduced in the 1992 Mellow biography of Hemingway. Front hinge expertly repaired else a very good copy with a little general cloth in a bright dust jacket with with a short 1 inch scratch on the spine, light wear, and two short tears to the rear panel. An exceptional Hemingway association copy enclosed in a morocco leather and cloth clamshell box.