New York: Pantheon, 1958

8vo, pp. 209. Original dark blue boards, lettered in gilt to spine and front panel. Hotel telephone message slip laid in. Spine uniformly sunned, very light bumping to corners, but a very good copy lacking the dust jacket.

First edition, INSCRIBED BY WATTS TO RUTH GOODKIND AND HER HUSBAND: 'For Ruth and Leo - with love from its author - Alan. November 1958.'

Alan Watts was the close friend, and possibly lover, of Ruth Agee Goodkind [1899-1983], a widowed former singer who lived in Evanston, on the outskirts of Chicago. Watts supported Ruth after her 12-year-old son Kenny was killed by a lightning strike, and in 1949 prepared her daughter Anne for confirmation into the Episcopalian church of which he was then a minister. In 1950 Watts was forced to resign his post as Chaplain of Northwestern University after multiple accusations of adultery, and left both his ministry and his marriage.

Watts moved to San Francisco in 1951 where he taught Asian studies, before finding fame with his extensive writings on Zen Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism. He and Ruth remained friends down the years, Ruth and her second husband Leo Roberg visiting Watts in New York in the 1960s when he was staying and working with Charlotte Selver, a pioneer in the field of sensory awareness. The telephone message slip laid in to the book was made out to Ruth -- 'Mrs. Roberg' -- by hotel staff on 14 March 1962. Watts' has later written his New York address, 'c/o Selver', to the verso, as well as his San Francisco P.O. Box address -- and a dirty limerick telling the unlikely story of a young girl of Madras...

Scarce inscribed, and with an association speaking to a close and enduring friendship, scarcer still.