1 hemingway's library - John F. Kennedy Library and Museum

and his four-viewed workroom and retreat on the towers's top floor.(134)
In addition to putting the Finca in order, she gathered together unpublished materials and personal possessions.
When she left, she took with her manuscripts, letters, other papers
that she felt were worth preserving, a number of valuable paintings and some books. The books that she removed
were collected hurriedly: "This was totally hap-hazard on my part. I took
books that I was quite sure were out of print and dealt mostly with Africa .... I did this in five minutes."(135) In
addition to the fine old volumes of Africana (items 164, 331, 2945 and 4789, for example) she also took a number of
books about Cuba, which she had purchased shortly after her arrival on the island sixteen years earlier in order to
familiarize herself with her new home (for example, items 1327, 3765, 5481). All of these volumes are now in Mary
Hemingway's private library (see Part IV, Section 6: MH). After Mary left Cuba, the government took possession of
the Finca Vigía and turned it into a Hemingway Museum. After some preparatory work, it was opened to the public
in 1962.(136)
IV. The Sources
Hemingway's library, as we have assembled it, is a composite record of book collections in six locations:
(1) The Big House at 907 Whitehead Street, Key West, Florida.
(2) The Pool House and Garage Apartment at 907 Whitehead Street, Key West, Florida.
(3) The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba.
(4) The Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts.
(5) A private collection of Hemingway materials.
(6) Mary Hemingway's personal library.
Additional publication information and about 225 titles were added from several other sources. The most important
of these are:
(7) The list made by Toby Bruce in 1941 of books shipped to Cuba.
(8) The invoices from the Scribner Book Store listing purchases by Hemingway.
1. KWH: Big House at 907 Whitehead Street, Key West, Florida
This list of precisely 200 numbered entries typed on eight pages was given to us by Mary Hemingway.
Handwritten across the top of the first page are the words, "Books in Big House, Key West." The compiler and date
are unknown, although it seems probably that it is the work of a realtor inventorying furnishings in the Big House
when it was being prepared for rental. The list is very well typed, contains only minor errors, and causes few serious
problems of interpretation.(137) It provides, however, no publication information, giving only the title and author of
a work. We have provided publication details only when these are available from another source such as the
Scribner invoices (see, for example, items 696, 1256, 6932). KWH contains some books published after
Hemingway left Key West: for example, Martha Gellhorn's Liana (1941) and John Hersey's Into the Valley (1943).
We have excluded from our record all books on this list published after 1939, the year Hemingway left Key West,
although there was undoubtedly some movement of books between Key West and Cuba as the children and their
parents travelled back and forth. KWH also contains a good many children's books. A few of these, such as Willard
F. Baker's Western Stories for Boys, Laura A. Large's Little Stories of Well-known Americans and Howard R. Garis'
Buddy on Mystery Mountain, could not have belonged to Hemingway when he was a child. They too have been
excluded from our record. In those cases, however, where a children's book was published early enough to have
belonged to Hemingway it has been included (see item 3293).
2. KW: The Pool House and Garage Apartment, 907 Whitehead Street, Key West, 1955.
This thirty-four-page list of 1,298 alphabetically arranged entries is now in the Kennedy Library. The first
page bears the inscription, "List of Books in the Pool House and Garage Apartment, December 1955." The words
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