STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

As a graduate of the Rare Book School, Emma Sarconi is always looking for that one rare book to sink her research tentacles into.

She found that this summer as she thumbed through books in the home library of the Hemingway House.

That would be “Streets in the Moon,” a book by Andrew MacLeish that the author gave to Hemingway. There were just 60 copies printed and, as far as Sarconi can tell, there are only two copies left, including this one.

“Owning a book is a very intentional act,” she said. “Oscar Wilde said you are what you read. To expose one’s book shelf is to expose oneself.”

The Community Library brought Sarconi in as its inaugural Hemingway Research Fellow for five weeks this summer after taking over the house and preserve from the Nature Conservancy.

“We took it over with trepidation and excitement,” said Library Director Jenny Emery Davidson. “And part of what we decided we needed to do was bring a research fellow to the library.”

Sarconi catalogued the collection, which included 482 books—231 in the living room, 84 in the guest bedroom and 147 in the master bedroom.

Most were published between 1956 and 1966—around the time the Hemingway’s moved into the home in 1959, indicating they didn’t bring many books from elsewhere.

There were no books by William Faulkner and only one by Shakespeare—a gift. Many were of the natural world, sporting such titles as “Hiking around Sun Valley,” ”Wildflowers of the Sawtooth Mountain Country,” “Roadside Geology of the Northern Rockies” and even a children’s book, “The Saga of the Sawtooths.”

The MacLeish book was printed on Kelmscott Handmade paper at the Riverside Press in 1926. Sixty had been printed but Sarconi couldn’t find more than two copies, even in the venerable book depositories of Harvard and Yale.

More exciting was a handwritten poem MacLeish had written in the book for Hemingway.

“Finding unpublished material is very unexpected!” she said.

Archibald MacLeish was an American poet and writer who, like Hemingway, served as an ambulance driver during World War I and lived in Paris in the 1920s amidst a community of literary expatriates that included Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Librarian of Congress under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.

Upon his return to America he published as a book a long poem titled “Land of the Free” that was built around 88 photographs of the Depression taken by Dorothea Lange and others. It served as one of the inspirations for John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

MacLeish once said that Hemingway was the only person he knew besides FDR who “could exhaust the oxygen in the room just by walking into it.”

He also said that Hemingway was a man he couldn’t get along with and a man he couldn’t get along without.

The poem MacLeish wrote for Hemingway was different from his published version and seemed to be drawing form their common experiences in war.

The poem titled “Voyage” starts out:

Heap we these coppered hulls with headed poppies and garlic longed for by the eager dead…

Pan we the island. Find we beyond the lands that share a past

Steep to that secret land

Across the sea rush

Trade we these cargoes with the dead. For sleep.”

“You look at books and say, ‘How can a book be more than a book?’ ‘What can it tell about the owners, the people who read them?’ ” Sarconi said.

The book is an important historical document and a testament of the friendship between the two authors, she added.  

“This was one of the books he chose to be in his home and, as noted, most of the books were not that old.”