The Suppressed First State: Authenticating A Farewell to Arms (1929)

The Hemingway Files — Volume II

Two days ago, I filed my report on The Sun Also Rises—Hemingway's 1926 Scribner's, the cornerstone that launched a thousand forgeries. The response was, for this readership, brisk. Several of you wrote to ask the obvious question: what about the 1929?

The obvious question deserves the obvious answer. Pull up a chair.

A Farewell to Arms is the more complicated specimen. Not because the bibliographic points are obscure—they are in fact elegantly consistent with Scribner's house methodology of the period. The complication is historical. This book arrived into the world trailing a war: not the Italian front it depicts, but a quieter, more insidious battle fought in an editor's office on Fifth Avenue. To understand why a true first state of the 1929 commands what it commands in today's market, you must understand what was done to Hemingway's manuscript before it reached the pressroom—and what that suppression means for the authenticity of every copy you will ever examine.

Let's look under the hood.

The Specimen: What We're Examining

A Farewell to Arms. Published by Charles Scribner's Sons, September 1929. A novel of the Italian campaign in the First World War, and of the American ambulance driver Frederic Henry, and of the nurse Catherine Barkley, and of the rain that never quite stops. Hemingway's second novel. His first masterwork. 332 pages that consolidated his reputation and broke his contract with the genteel American publishing establishment simultaneously.

The book was simultaneously serialized in Scribner's Magazine—May through October 1929—while the editorial negotiations over its text were still in progress. This is not a trivial fact. The serialized text and the first edition text are not identical. If you ever encounter a bookseller who attempts to sell you a "pre-publication" Scribner's Magazine run as equivalent in value to the book, thank them politely for their time and walk away. They are not the same object.

She is a book born under censorship. You need to know that before you touch her spine.

The Battlefield Behind the Book: Hemingway vs. Perkins

The working relationship between Hemingway and Maxwell Perkins—Scribner's editorial titan, the man who also managed Fitzgerald and Wolfe—is one of the most documented author-editor partnerships in American literary history. What is less discussed in casual collector circles is the specific nature of their conflict over A Farewell to Arms.

Hemingway's original manuscript used soldier's language. Authentic language. The language of men who have watched other men die in the mud of the Isonzo River. This is not a rhetorical point—it is a bibliographic one. Perkins, navigating the obscenity statutes of the era and the commercial realities of a publisher with a magazine subscription base, required excisions. Hemingway was not pleased. The correspondence is preserved. His objections were explicit. His compliance was tactical rather than enthusiastic.

The result: the published first edition of A Farewell to Arms is a censored document. Specific words—soldier vernacular, profanity, the vocabulary of the body under duress—were replaced, elided, or represented by dashes. The wounds are visible if you know where to look. And a collector examining this book is, in a real sense, examining a primary document in the history of American literary censorship.

This history matters to valuation. The first edition is not merely the first appearance of the novel. It is the first appearance of the compromised text—the version that Hemingway did not consider complete. The restored text did not appear in a scholarly edition until decades later. The first edition is a crime scene as much as a literary artifact.

I find it more interesting for that reason, not less.

The Points of Issue: What the Bibliography Requires

Now we turn clinical. Set aside the literary history and put on the spectacles.

Scribner's maintained a consistent house methodology for identifying first printings in this period, and those who followed my report on The Sun Also Rises will recognize the logic immediately. The tells are both textual and physical, and you must examine all of them before you form a verdict.

The Copyright Page: The Primary Tell

The copyright page of a genuine first edition, first printing of A Farewell to Arms will read, in the relevant portion: "Published September, 1929." Nothing more. No "Second printing." No "Reprinted." No enumerated list of subsequent editions. The absence of subsequent printing statements is the affirmative declaration of priority.

Below that copyright statement, at the foot of the copyright page, you will find Scribner's printer's code: the letter "A."

This is the same "A" I described in my report on The Sun Also Rises. Scribner's used this alphabetic colophon to designate printing order. "A" is first. "B" is second. The letter is not decorative. It is a declaration. Find it; verify it; trust it.

If the copyright page in front of you announces a second printing, or if the "A" has been replaced by a subsequent letter, you are not holding a first state. You may be holding a handsome reading copy. You are not holding the specimen you paid for.

The Binding: Reading the Cloth

The first edition presents in a dark blue-green cloth binding—a color that calls to mind the Isonzo River and the Adriatic winter, though I will not pretend Scribner's color choices were intentionally elegiac. The gilt lettering on the spine should be crisp and unfaded. The binding should be square and tight.

A word of caution regarding bindings: the collector market for this title has produced rebinding work of variable quality. A book that presents in suspiciously pristine cloth on an aging text block, or whose cloth grain does not match surviving documented examples, warrants further scrutiny. The binding is not a sufficient authentication point on its own. It must corroborate the internal evidence, not replace it.

Run your fingers along the hinge joints—both front and rear. A natural hinge will show age-consistent stress: hairline cracking of the cloth at the joint line, consistent with a book that has been opened over nine decades. A rebound copy will present false tightness. The cloth at the joints will be too fresh. The boards will open with none of the slight reluctance of genuinely aged binding glue. The body knows. The hands know. Trust the tactile report.

The Dust Jacket: The Ghost in the Room

Here is where the arithmetic of this title diverges most dramatically from the casual collector's expectation.

The dust jacket for the first edition of A Farewell to Arms is extremely rare in any condition above "Acceptable." Paper jackets from 1929 were not considered valuable at the time of issue—they were protective wrappers, used and discarded. Libraries stripped them for binding work. Purchasers folded them, creased them, tore them off at the spine. The institutional habit of considering the jacket ephemeral is responsible for the financial reality that a jacketed first edition of this title commands a multiple—sometimes a very large multiple—of its unjacketed counterpart.

Examine any offered jacket with the same forensic patience you apply to the binding. The paper should show period-consistent aging: slight foxing at the margins, tanning at the edges, the particular brittleness of acid-laden 1920s paper stock that has been in proximity to light and air. A jacket in suspiciously pristine condition should be examined under UV light for evidence of washing, restoration, or sophisticated facsimile reproduction.

I have handled facsimile jackets for this title that were, frankly, excellent work. The tell was not visible to the naked eye. Under UV, the paper's fluorescence was wrong—too white, too even, the acid-free modern paper stock betraying its twenty-first-century manufacture by its very cleanliness.

A marriage copy—a jacket sourced from a different printing than the book it is now encasing—is a lie, regardless of how lovingly it has been paired. The wear patterns of jacket and boards must rhyme. Spinal fading should be consistent between the two. If the boards show forty years of shelf rub but the jacket's spine is suspiciously unbleached, you are looking at a marriage ceremony that should not have taken place.

The Forty-Seven Endings: A Note for the Serious Scholar

Hemingway rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms repeatedly—by his own account and by the evidence of the manuscript held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. The final manuscript shows dozens of alternate conclusions. The ending the first edition reader received is, therefore, not merely the ending Hemingway chose; it is the ending that survived the negotiation between Hemingway's artistic judgment and the accumulated weight of editorial pressure, marital circumstance, and deadline.

This is not a "points of issue" matter in the bibliographic sense. No variant endings appear in circulation as textual variants within the first printing run. I raise it because the serious collector of this title should understand the manuscript context of the object they hold. A first edition of A Farewell to Arms is not simply a printed book. It is the terminus of a composition process as documented and contested as any in American letters.

That history is, in part, what you are paying for.

The Dedication: A Forensic Note

The first edition carries a dedication of deliberate brevity: "TO G.H."

G.H. is Guy Hickok, an American journalist and longtime Hemingway friend based in Paris. The dedication is spare even by Hemingway's standards—a two-letter cipher in a book about loss and retreat. The person who knows Hickok's identity reads the dedication differently than the person who does not. This is intentional.

I mention it here not because it constitutes a point of issue, but because any copy presented to you without this dedication, or with a variant dedication, demands immediate explanation.

Market Analysis: What She Commands

The market for a genuine first edition, first printing of A Farewell to Arms in very good condition without dust jacket currently hovers in the range of $1,500 to $4,000, depending on the granularity of "very good" and the provenance of the copy. These figures reflect the post-pandemic adjustment in the American literary first edition market: a correction from the overheated years between 2018 and 2022, with prices stabilizing at levels that remain historically elevated relative to the 2010 baseline.

A fine copy with a dust jacket in presentable—not merely surviving, but presentable—condition changes the arithmetic entirely. Documented auction results for jacketed copies in fine or near-fine condition have ranged from $18,000 into the mid-five figures, with exceptional copies—strong provenance, association history, the jacket intact and unrestored—occasionally exceeding that range at the major houses.

The speculative energy around "signed" copies of this title reflects the broader signed-firsts bubble I dissected in Monday's post on the autograph trap. Hemingway signatures are extensively forged. Unless a signed copy comes with a documented provenance chain—and I mean a genuine provenance chain, not a receipt from a dealer who bought it from a dealer who bought it at an estate sale in 1994—approach with maximum caution. The bibliography of Hemingway signatures is its own treacherous subspecialty.

The Verdict

A genuine first edition, first printing of A Farewell to Arms is a cornerstone acquisition—full stop. She is not the most technically complex Scribner's authentication case you will encounter, but she is among the most historically layered. The bibliographic points are clear and consistent with the methodology I have already described for the 1926 Hemingway. The jacket, when present, transforms the specimen into something rarer still.

The complications are not bibliographic. They are human. Forgeries of the dust jacket. Marriage copies assembled to deceive. Signed copies of dubious provenance. The collector navigating this title must be simultaneously a bibliographer, a paper scientist, and a genealogist of ownership.

If you find her with the "A" intact, the copyright page clean, the jacket original, and the binding honest—buy her without negotiation. You will not regret the outlay. She is a witness to a war, to a censorship, and to the specific moment when American literature decided that certain truths could be stated and certain truths would have to wait.

She is worth what she costs.

Filed from Providence, 01:47 AM
The bibliography never lies.

Happy hunting.
— J.V.