GREENE (GRAHAM) The Heart of the Matter, ADVANCE PROOF COPY OF THE FIRST EDITION, EXTENSIVELY CORRECTED, with amendments and alterations to the text (i.e. "vulture" for "buzzard" on p.1, "Bedford [Hotel]" for "Grand [Hotel]" on p.37), marginal proof emendations to punctuation and italics etc. seemingly written by a proof editor after the author's instructions (see footnote), publisher's wrappers, the upper cover reusing printer's waste from a Heinemann paperback edition of Georgette Heyer's "An Infamous Army", without the lower wrapper, some spotting and wear, modern solander box, 8vo, William Heinemann, [1948] RARE ADVANCE PROOF COPY WITH COPIOUS MANUSCRIPT CORRECTIONS, A FEW IN GREENE'S OWN HAND. The extensive proof corrections are mostly in the hand of an unidentified copy editor, copied out after Greene's own authorial corrections and thus showing his last minute changes to the text. Greene's own proof copy with his autograph corrections, which he had gifted to his editor A.S. Frere, was sold at Bloomsbury Auctions in 2016. It appears that after Greene's corrections had been added to that copy, he then reread, and added 8 or 9 further minor corrections to our copy. As with the Frere proof, our copy includes a dedication ('To V.G., L.C.G., & F.C.G.') on the verso of the title, alterations to the introductory Rilke quote, and many changes to individual words. We have been unable to make a comparison between the copies but there do appear to be minor differences. For instance the Frere copy has a printed list of Greene's other publications facing the title-page, whilst our copy has that page blank with an ink note reading "Also by Graham Greene [ink line, no titles listed] List of books". "The Heart of the Matter was enormously popular, selling more than 300,000 copies in Britain. It was also a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in America. Though Greene considered the book his most serious work to date, it brought him more money than all his previous entertainments combined" (ODNB). Provenance: Alan Pryce-Jones (1908–2000), with his name in ink on upper cover. Heart of the Matter was published in the year that Pryce-Jones became editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and Greene was for a time a neighbour of Pryce-Jones when both men lived at Albany, London. Later Pryce-Jones' son David wrote a biography of Greene (1963); by descent to the present owner.