Hemingway’s rude rhymes unveiled

An example of Ernest Hemingway's poetic skills have been discovered scrawled in the fly leaf of his debut collection of short stories, In Our Time, but anyone expecting the emergence of a new talent will be disappointed. The two poems - unpublishable at the time because of their rudeness – are dedicated to his lifelong friend and drinking buddy Jack Cowles, and deal with masturbation and the "lost generation", the name given by Gertrude Stein to the expatriate American writers living in Paris in the 1920s.

The first reads: "I know monks masturbate at night/That pet cats screw/That some girls bite/And yet, old Soul/What can I do to get things right."

Mark Hime, the owner of the book, will be showing the poems at the Olympia Antiquarian Book Fair, which opens this weekend, and he hopes to sell them later at auction for around £75,000. He accepts, however, that Hemingway was wise to stick to prose. He said: "We're not talking TS Eliot here."