[SPORT] "The Major" [Pseud: GRANT, Madison]

Hank; His Lies and His Yarns

New York: Privately Printed, 1931. First, Limited Edition. Octavo. 24.5cm. No. 47 of 150 copies. Publisher's deep red pebble grain cloth titled in gilt to spine and front board. 114pp. Very light wear to corners and extremities, strong, tight and solid; internally clean and fresh, deep maroon endpapers, bookplate to front pastedown, tape residue from an old protective cover to endpapers, fore-edge untrimmed, inscribed by the author to the limitation page. A very good, sharp copy indeed of a very elusive printing.

The book itself, printed for the author under a pseudonym, is a fairly straightforward piece of hunting and sporting Americana; the eponymous Hank is a kind of rural Virgil to the amateur hunter, stuffed full of folksy wisdom and pithy observation, although the author is quick to point out Hank is not overburdened by formal education - he's there to give wealthy fellows someone to tell anecdotes about over their post-hunt cocktails. The limited edition itself is an elusive first printing, mentioned in bibliography but seldom seen, with the more usually attainable issue being the 1937 reprint. The authorial inscription to the limitation page reads:
"To My Friend William White Niles, With Affectionate Regards, Madison Grant, September 1931."

Madison Grant, of course, was the powerful, wealthy, and hugely influential chap who could justifiably be described as one of the leading figures in the early US environmental and conservation movements, a key figure in the history of the National Parks Service, campaigner for the protection of the American Bison, gun control advocate, founder member of the American Zoological Society, the driving force behind the Bronx Zoo (and the creation of the roads that take you there), and the man instrumental in the protection of the California Redwood tree. The recipient of the inscription, William White Niles, was not only a friend of Grant, but also a frequent collaborator in his reformation of the landscape of the East River areas of New York, developing and executing the Taconic State Parkway, the Bronx River Parkway and a number of other projects that connected the outlying NY districts to the beating heart of the city.
Grant, for all of his admirable zeal for the great American outdoors, was also a virulent racist, eugenicist, and white supremacist. He is the author of 1916's "The Passing of The Great Race", which is essentially the basis of a lot of the white European purity and superiority tropes we live with today (like the idea that the superior "Nordic" races are in danger of extinction), and suggested that what he called "worthless race types" should be forcibly sterilized to stop their taint from spreading.
He was virulently anti-immigration, which is somewhat ironic for a man whose family hailed from England and the Netherlands, was a major proponent of the 1924 Immigration Act in his capacity as Vice-President of the Immigration Restriction League, and firmly believed in the panicky hotch-potch of discredited pseudo-science that justified his beliefs, as did a number of his contemporaries. He also lobbied very strongly to have a kidnapped Congolese man, Ota Benga, moved permanently into the ape enclosure at the Bronx Zoo to be exhibited alongside the primates.

His ideas fell rather precipitously from favor when it was discovered that his work was a major influence on the early thinking of Hitler (who referred to it in correspondence with Grant as his "personal Bible") and an embryonic blueprint for the development of the Third Reich.
Completely apart from the dizzying contradictions inherent in Grant's character, and presumably with an interest solely in the sporting content, the bookplate is that of William Van Winkle, pre-eminent sporting collector and bibliographer, whose works on American sporting writers are still the required texts for any serious collector. Scarce.

Price: $750.00

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