Home / Browse / Autographs & Signed Books / The Maltese Falcon.
HAMMETT, Dashiell.
The Maltese Falcon.
First edition, first printing. With the author's signed presentation inscription to an early blank, "To Raoul and Prudence Whitfield - the first today - Dashiell Hammett January 23, 1930". Raoul Whitfield (1896-1945) was a well-connected steel magnate who wrote more than 300 short stories in his brief authorial career under his own name and the pseudonym Ramon Decolta. He published a large number of detective stories in Black Mask and would have known Hammett through its editor Joseph Shaw. Indeed Hammett is known to have inscribed two copies on the first day he received them - one to Shaw and the other the present example. A stunning early copy and a fine association.
Octavo. Original grey cloth, falcon motif to upper board in blue, titles and geometric design to spine in black and blue, top edge stained blue. With the pictorial dust jacket supplied from another copy. Spine a little dull but a very nice copy in the minutely tanned, price-clipped dust jacket with some light traces of tape removal to the verso.
