A Hand in Sport: Thirty-five Years with the Light Touch by MULLIN, Willard - 1958

New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1958. Hardcover. Small 4to. Black cloth with silver spine lettering, pictorial dust jacket. xii, 226pp. Frontispiece, extensive illustrations, pictorial endpapers. Near fine/very good. Book fine but for age toned front endpaper from long-ago newsprint contact; jacket bright and nice though faintly edgeworn, with single large chip at head of spine. A handsome and tight first edition (and superb presentation copy inscribed to a sports figure who appears in it) of this collection of sports cartoons by the highly influential syndicated American newspaper sports cartoonist (1902-78) best known for the Brooklyn Dodgers persona called the "Brooklyn Bum." Below the frontispiece portrait showing him drawing, he boldly inscribes and signs in blue ballpoint "To / Red Reeder, King of the / Literary Frontier, from / one of his subjects -- / Willard Mullin." Near the top of the title page, recipient Reeder likewise inscribes and signs in blue ballpoint: "Willard was designated / 'Cartoonist of the Century' / in 1970 / by his fellow cartoonists. / Red Reeder." The pictorial front endpaper is chock full of 33 tiny Mullin head caricatures of sports figures surrounded by the cartoon-y names of all those featured in this book, and the name "Red Reeder" appears among these at the center right margin, so presumably he appears somewhere within the volume; someone (likely Reeder himself) has filled in about 35 of these 100+ names in red crayon -- perhaps at random, more likely persons he knew personally. Russell "Red" Reeder (1902-98) was a West Pointer with a notable career in World War Two as a colonel commanding the 12th Infantry Regiment of the Fourth Infantry Division, leading 3,000 troops on Utah Beach during D-Day and losing a leg at the Battle of Normandy; post-war he became athletic director at West Point for twenty years, then authored a number of young adult nonfiction books such as "The West Point Story," "Medal of Honor Heroes," "The Civil War Story" and others. An outstanding presentation copy.