First edition, first printing. Beautifully bound in full red Morocco, with black onlay and blocked in 22 carat gold. This title includes a full 22 carat gilt spine, hand sewn silk headbands, and hand marbled papers.
Hemingway became a bullfighting aficionado after seeing the Pamplona Festival of San Fermín in the 1920s. He wrote about the tradition in the novel The Sun Also Rises. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explores the metaphysics of bullfighting—the ritualized, almost religious practice—that he considered analogous to the writer's search for meaning and the essence of life. In bullfighting, he found the elemental nature of life and death
Hemingway writes, "the only place where you could see life and death, i.e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death" (p. 2). The book, affectionately called the Bible of bullfighting, made Hemingway "the leading exponent of the corrida outside the Spanish-speaking world"
