The Summer Game

New York: The Viking Press, 1972 First edition, first printing. Presentation copy, signed and inscribed by Angell on front free endpaper to literary couple Barbara ("Bobbie") and Spencer Klaw: "For Bobbie and Spence - About time you became fans, isn't it? Love, Roger." Publisher's blue cloth-backed green paper-covered boards, with spine lettered in blue and yellow; in its original white pictorial dust jacket, with a drawing of a baseball player by James Stevenson to front panel, lettered in green, blue, and black. Near fine book, with light toning to board edges, a tiny bump to left edge of rear board, and light offsetting to endpapers; very good unclipped dust jacket, with modest wear to spine ends, a small closed tear to top right of rear panel, light toning to panel edges and flaps, a tiny spot of soiling to rear panel, and some light creases to flaps. Overall, an excellent copy. The Summer Game spans 10 years (1962 - 1971) of baseball-themed New Yorker essays by Roger Angell. From the jacket flap: "Here is baseball in many forms…Mr. Angell sees it all with humor and affection, but his cold explicit bitterness over the arrogance and greed of most of the sports proprietors reveals a man with a rare vision of the strength and delicacy and complex beauty of the summer game." Roger Angell (1920 - 2022) was a long-time fiction editor and writer for The New Yorker. He was the son of Katherine Sergeant, an early and influential editor for The New Yorker who helped shape the magazine, and the stepson of E. B. White. At The New Yorker, Roger edited works by Woody Allen, John Updike, William Trevor, and other top writers. In a 2006 interview, Angell relates how he told a young Woody Allen, whose style heavily imitated that of legendary New Yorker humor writer, S. J. Perelman, "We already have one of these." Angell holds the distinction of being the only person elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Baseball Writers' Association of America, and he received the prestigious J. G. Taylor Spink Award for "meritorious contributions to baseball writing" in 2014. Barbara ("Bobbie") Klaw (1920 - 2002) was an author and editor, and part of the notable literary Van Doren family, her father being Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Carl Van Doren. Her first book, Camp Follower (1944) told the story of a young wife in wartime, and she served as editor at Horizon and American Heritage magazines. Spencer Klaw (1920 - 2004) was a reporter, professor, and journalist who served as editor of the Columbia Journalism Review in the 1980s and oversaw an expansion of its coverage. He authored three books: The New Brahmins: Scientific Life in America (1968), The Great American Medicine Show (1975), and Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (1993). Roger Angell and his wife, Carol, were close friends with Spencer and Barbara Klaw. Roger and Spencer attended Harvard University together, and Carol and Barbara worked together at American Heritage. In Roger Angell's New Yorker essay "Life During Wartime" (1967), he recounts attending an antiwar protest in Washington D.C. with the Klaws. He refers to Spencer as "my old college pal," and mentions that the pair of couples would sometimes watch Ivy League football games together in the fall. . Signed by Author. First Edition. Hard Cover. Near Fine/Dust Jacket Included.