Death in the Afternoon. London: Cape, 1932. First Edition. Pp, 358. Publisher’s cloth boards, lettered in black. Boards a little dusty, contents in nice bright condition. Lacking the dust jacket.

Illustrated with a Juan Gris coloured frontispiece & black and white photographic plates.

Hemingway’s first full-length work of non-fiction is a passionate and detailed exploration of the history, ceremony, and traditions of Spanish bullfighting . Written after his experiences at the Pamplona festival in the 1920s, the book delves into the metaphysics of the bullring, examining the nature of fear and courage . It is also notable for containing Hemingway’s famous “iceberg theory” of writing, where he explains that the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

The American edition was published by Scribner’s later the same year, but this is the true first edition, published by Cape in London