Fans of Hemingway, add a beautiful facsimile of the first edition to your shelves!

From the original 1940 NYT review of the book (https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-forwhom.html):


All that need be said here about the new Hemingway novel can be said in relatively few words. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is a tremendous piece of work. It is the most moving document to date on the Spanish Civil War, and the first major novel of the Second World War.


As a story, it is superb, packed with the matter of picaresque romance: blood, lust, adventure, vulgarity, comedy, tragedy. For Robert Jordan, the young American from Montana, the lust and adventure are quickly drowned in blood. The comedy, as in other Hemingway fiction, is practically indistinguishable from the vulgarity, which in this case is a rich and indigenous peasant brand. The tragedy is present and only too plain; the bell that began tolling in Madrid four years ago is audible everywhere today.


Robert Jordan is a partizan attached to the Loyalist forces. He is neither a professing Communist nor a professional soldier, but a college instructor who happened to be in Spain on sabbatical leave. During the three or four days covered by the story, he hides out in Franco-controlled territory, into which he has been sent by headquarters to dynamite a strategic mountain bridge.


...Mr. Hemingway has always been the writer, but he has never been the master that he is in "For Whom the Bell Tolls." The dialogue, handled as though in translation from the Spanish, is incomparable. The characters are modeled in high relief. A few of the scenes are perfect, notably the last sequence and an earlier one when Jordan awakes to the sound of a horse thumping along through the snow. Others are intense and terrifying, still others gentle and almost pastoral, if here and there a trifle sweet.


It is fourteen years since "The Sun Also Rises" and eleven since "A Farewell to Arms." More than three hundred years ago John Donne said, "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine. * * * And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Mr. Hemingway has taken this text and, out of his experiences, convictions and great gifts, built on it his finest novel.

For First Edition Library collectors, a very helpful web page (https://www.biblio.com/publisher/first-editions-library):

First Editions Library is a series of exact facsimile replicas of the first editions published by Collectors Reprint Inc. Founded in 1987 by Henry Reath, a former president and publisher of Doubleday; his wife, Mary; and Kemp Battle, who also worked at Doubleday, the company prided itself on publishing the best of American literature as it first appeared.

FEL facsimiles have the same weight, size, typeface, art, dust jacket, finish and texture as well as points of issue as the originals. In many cases, the Reaths and Battle waded into debate amongst themselves about which editions were indeed the first. With the mission of duplicating the originals as closely as possible, the publisher hired engravers to reproduce typefaces that are no longer used. They dyed both sides of paper to create a shade of green no longer available for the dust jacket on Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The sewn bindings, stamping and even the original price on the jacket flap of FEL facsimiles are all exact replicas....

In total, FEL produced 112 titles. Sometime in the 1990s, FEL stopped production and sold the rights for 49 of its facsimiles to Easton Press. However, the remaining 63 titles are out-of-print...

BCES2/5df9