Greene, Graham. The Heart of the Matter (Inscribed Special Edition). Viking, New York, 1948.

Price: US$1500.00 + shipping

Description: Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. One of 750 copies of the first edition specially bound for distribution to friends of the Viking Press. Light separation to front hinge thus nearly fine in grey cloth binding with red-and-black stamping to the front panel and faded spine, absent dw as issued. INSCRIBED and contemporaneously dated by Greene on the front end paper to Viking Press editor Dorothy Shereff. One of Greene’s most popular and enduring works, and chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. Uncommon signed.

Seller: Tom Davidson, Bookseller, Brooklyn, NY, U.S.A.

Greene, Graham. The Heart of the Matter.. The Viking Press, New York, 1948.

Price: US$5500.00 + shipping

Description: First American edition of what many consider the author’s masterpiece. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "For Bob Goldstein from Graham Greene Nothing under $200,000." Fine in a near fine dust jacket with light rubbing. Jacket design by Edgard Cirlin. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. The Heart of the Matter was enormously popular, selling more than 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom upon its release and went on to win the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. It tells the story of a good man enmeshed in love, intrigue, and evil in a West African coastal town. Scobie is bound by strict integrity to his role as assistant police commissioner and by severe responsibility to his wife, Louise, for whom he cares with a fatal pity. When Scobie falls in love with the young widow Helen, he finds vital passion again yielding to pity, integrity giving way to deceit and dishonorâ€"a vortex leading directly to murder. As Scobie's world crumbles, his personal crisis develops the foundation of a story by turns suspenseful, fascinating, and, finally, tragic. ''Graham Greene was in a class by himself. He will be read and remembered as the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety" (William Golding). It was named by The Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the it was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.

Seller: Raptis Rare Books, Palm Beach, FL, U.S.A.