8vo. Illustrated with photographs. Original black cloth; sides a trifle spotted, a few stains on front free endpaper. Pictorial dust jacket; spine soiled with wear at ends, rear panel a bit soiled and with small piece chipped from top edge. Case.

Hanneman A10a

first edition of Hemingway’s classic work on bullfighting. presentation copy to his host Bill Davis during the “dangerous summer” of 1959, inscribed by Hemingway on the front free endpaper: “For Bill remembering May First-October 27, 1959 and all the roads and places, Ernest, La Consula, 19/10/59.” Laid in is a customer’s receipt from the Scribner Book Store in New York, dated 1 June 1959, for a first edition of Death in the Afternoon—this copy—priced at $30, plus 83 cents for delivery, all to be charged to “Ernest Hemingway Author’s Account.”

Nathan (Bill or Negro) Davis was a wealthy American expatriate, an aficionado, and the owner of the large estate, La Consula, near Malaga, where the Hemingways were house guests from May to October 1959. (Hemingway had first met him at Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1940.) La Consula was used as a base by Hemingway during the “dangerous summer” when he was traveling through much of Spain for the series of mano a mano bullfights between Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. Bill Davis traveled with Hemingway for much of the season, doing most of the driving (see “all the roads and places” in the inscription), and he is, of course, present in many of the pages of the author’s account of the summer. It was at La Consula where Davis and his wife Anne hosted the elaborate party for Hemingway’s sixtieth birthday on 21 July, and it was at the Davis estate on 10 October—nine days before the inscription—that Hemingway began work on “The Dangerous Summer” article for Life magazine (published as a book by Scribner’s in 1960).  Death in the Afternoon was inscribed on the same day as a copy of Across the River and into the Trees was to Anne (see lot 342 in the Neville Sale, Part II) and the copies were likely farewell presents on Hemingway’s part. He would go on to Paris and would sail bacไk to American on 27 October (his wife Mary had left in September).