THE NATURAL by Malamud, Bernard - 1963

London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Very Good in Near Fine dust jacket. 1963. First British Edition. Hardcover. 248 pages; This First British Edition includes an afterword and glossary by Malamud not present in the earlier American edition. Original owner's inscription on ffep, otherwise clean and tight in original blue boards with lettering in silver and image of a baseball in red at spine. Wonderful pictorial dustjacket is about Fine with a small crease near base of spine. McCue, page 66. Shannon 100. Inscribed on ffep from Bill Kintos to Harry Broley dated "Sept., 1963 / Lagos, Nigeria". The inscription quotes Thomas Browne (from Religio Medici, Section 15): "We carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us" In the mid-1970s, C. William ("Bill") Kintos was with the State Department's policy planning staff and serving as special representative for President Ford as chairman of the Sinai Support Mission and the Inter-Agency Management Board. The board consisted of representatives the Departments of State and Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Agency for lnternational Developement, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and is located in the State Department. In September 1963 when this book was inscribed (just a month before Nigeria proclaimed itself the Federal Republic of Nigeria), Kintos was likely working in Africa for the State Department or some other U.S. Agency or contractor. It was a very unsettled time in Nigeria. Clarence H. "Harry" Broley was an urban planner who worked for Arthur D. Little Inc., and later had his own consulting business, specialising in transportation, urban infrastructure and communications. After graduating from high school, Broley was drafted by the Cincinnati Reds organization, but World War II cut his baseball career short. He enlisted in the Navy and served in the Pacific as a pilot and worked in Naval Intelligence. Broley led projects on revitalizing the downtown areas of decaying cities in Nigeria, Australia, Saudi Arabia and the United States. While working for Arthur D. Little, Inc. in the 1950s, Broley became friends with Moe Berg, the baseball player turned spy who worked for the OSS during World War II and occasionally for the CIA until the early 1950s. Sharing a love of baseball and used book stores, Broley and Berg often went to Red Sox games and visited Cambridge bookstores together. Broley was working on a baseball project for the city of Buffalo and hired Berg to assist him. They saw each other frequently over the course of the three year project. Interestingly, many of the baseball scenes the 1984 film based on this novel were filmed in Buffalo at New York's War Memorial Stadium. .