ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell. A true American First Edition, Harcourt, Brace and Company, NY, [1946], 118 pp, in a very good dust jacket. The pencil signature at the top of the flyleaf is that of Henry Strater. This comes directly from Strater’s personal library in his Ogunquit, Maine. We purchased his library. There is a long ink inscription to Starter below signed with an initial, which we have never been able to identify. The inscription mentioned Helm Place in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. The back dust jacket also was signed by Strater in pencil. Henry Strater (1896-1987) a Lost Generation artist who fished with, fought and eventually befriended Ernest Hemingway and illustrated the controversial "Cantos" of poet Ezra Pound. He was the inspiration for the character Burne Halliday in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "This Side of Paradise." Strater had gone to Paris in the 1920s to study at the Academy Grande Chaumiere and with Edouard Vuillard when he met Hemingway. The two became friends but only after they had brawled on a Paris street corner. The street-corner brawl was followed sometime later by a verbal encounter over a then-record 14-foot, 4-inch black marlin caught during a fishing trip to Bimini in 1935. "It was my fish, but when the photographer came by to take the picture at the dock, Hemingway sidled up close to the fish, stuck out his chest, and got his picture taken as if he had caught it. Time magazine later claimed he did," Strater said. A Strater portrait of Hemingway later was used for the cover of Carlos Baker's biography of the Nobel-winning writer.

VG