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Onze Man in Havana — Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Amsterdam en Antwerpen: Uitgeverij Contact, 1959
First Dutch Edition · First Printing
The Book:
The first Dutch edition, first printing of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, published in Dutch as Onze Man in Havana only one year after the original English edition. Translated by H. W. J. Schaap, the volume retains its original mustard-yellow publisher’s cloth with blue spine lettering and front-board decoration, as well as its original pictorial dust jacket with the printed price of f 6.90. The publication page records the original English title and the 1959 Contact translation copyright, confirming this as the novel’s first Dutch appearance.
Condition:
Near Fine in a Very Good dust jacket. The book itself is exceptionally well preserved, with a square, tight binding, bright cloth, and a remarkably clean interior apart from a previous-owner signature on the front free endpaper. The original jacket retains strong front-panel artwork but shows substantial spine fading, moderate edge wear, several small chips and short tears, a triangular loss at the upper edge of the rear panel, and an old tape repair along the lower rear edge. It is protected in an archival polyester jacket.
Story Of The Book
The most dangerous spy in Graham Greene’s Havana never existed.
Jim Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in pre-revolutionary Cuba. He is not an intelligence officer. He has no secret network and no important information to provide.
Then British intelligence recruits him.
Needing the money but lacking actual sources, Wormold begins inventing them. He fabricates agents, manufactures reports, and sends London increasingly elaborate intelligence—including drawings inspired by vacuum-cleaner parts that are interpreted as evidence of sinister military installations.
The absurdity is funny because the institution takes it seriously.
That is Greene’s real target.
Our Man in Havana is not primarily a satire of one incompetent spy. It is a satire of organizations supposedly devoted to discovering truth that become more interested in information that confirms what they already expect to find. Wormold’s inventions succeed because the bureaucracy receiving them wants them to be true.
And once an institution has invested its credibility in a fiction, correcting the fiction becomes more threatening than believing it.
Greene knew something about that world. His own experience in British intelligence gave the novel’s comedy a sharper edge: behind the jokes is a warning about secrecy, bureaucracy, incentives, and the enormous political consequences that can follow when governments mistake plausible stories for verified facts. The inventory identifies precisely this critique of intelligence culture, fabricated information, and institutional self-deception as the book’s central relevance to the collection.
The timing of this edition adds another remarkable layer. Onze Man in Havana appeared in 1959, just a year after Greene’s original novel—and at the very moment the Cuban Revolution was transforming the actual Havana in which his fictional intelligence farce had been set.
Wormold invents intelligence because he has nothing real to report. The frightening part is how eagerly power turns his inventions into reality.
Why It’s In The Collection
Onze Man in Havana belongs in Consigned to Darkness because governments do not need to deliberately lie in order to become dangerous.
Sometimes they only need systems that reward certainty more than doubt.
Greene’s intelligence officers are not conventional tyrants. Their failure is institutional. Information rises through a bureaucracy, acquires authority because official people repeat it, and eventually becomes difficult to challenge precisely because the institution has already acted as though it were true.
That makes the novel an unusually useful examination of the relationship between truth and government power.
Many books in the collection ask what happens when authorities conceal the truth. Greene asks something different: what happens when an institution becomes so confident in its own processes that it can no longer reliably distinguish truth from the fiction those processes have produced?
This Dutch first edition is a supporting rather than definitive bibliographical copy—the English first edition remains the collection’s long-term upgrade target. But it is a genuine first edition in its own national publication history, retaining its original priced jacket and preserving the novel’s introduction to Dutch readers only one year after its first appearance.
And because it appeared in 1959, this particular edition carries Greene’s fictional Havana into an especially striking historical moment: a Cold War satire about governments misunderstanding Cuba reaching new readers just as Cuba itself was becoming one of the central geopolitical problems governments would struggle to understand.
Greene’s joke is that the intelligence is fake. His warning is that once an institution believes it, the consequences become real.
Collection Categories: Publication-Event Object · Literature · Political History · Anti-Authoritarianism · War & Conflict · Cold War · Institutional Power · Espionage & Intelligence
———
Authentication Evidence
• Correct Dutch title page reading Onze Man in Havana by Graham Greene.
• Title page identifies Uitgeverij Contact, Amsterdam en Antwerpen, consistent with the original Dutch publication.
• Verso states the original English title, Our Man in Havana (1958), identifying this as the authorized Dutch translation.
• Copyright page records Translation Copyright 1959 by Contact, Amsterdam, establishing the first Dutch publication year.
• Translation credited to H. W. J. Schaap, consistent with the original Dutch edition.
• Original publisher's cloth binding with the correct blue stamped spine lettering and front-board decoration remains present.
• Original publisher's pictorial dust jacket survives.
• Dust jacket retains the printed publisher's price Geb. / 6.90, indicating an original priced jacket rather than a later replacement.
• Jacket typography, artwork, and publisher imprint are consistent throughout.
• No book-club indicators, later edition statements, or evidence of modern rebinding or restoration are observed.
• All observable bibliographic characteristics are consistent with the first Dutch edition, first printing.
Graham Greene
Amsterdam en Antwerpen: Uitgeverij Contact, 1959
First Dutch Edition · First Printing
The Book:
The first Dutch edition, first printing of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, published in Dutch as Onze Man in Havana only one year after the original English edition. Translated by H. W. J. Schaap, the volume retains its original mustard-yellow publisher’s cloth with blue spine lettering and front-board decoration, as well as its original pictorial dust jacket with the printed price of f 6.90. The publication page records the original English title and the 1959 Contact translation copyright, confirming this as the novel’s first Dutch appearance.
Condition:
Near Fine in a Very Good dust jacket. The book itself is exceptionally well preserved, with a square, tight binding, bright cloth, and a remarkably clean interior apart from a previous-owner signature on the front free endpaper. The original jacket retains strong front-panel artwork but shows substantial spine fading, moderate edge wear, several small chips and short tears, a triangular loss at the upper edge of the rear panel, and an old tape repair along the lower rear edge. It is protected in an archival polyester jacket.
Story Of The Book
The most dangerous spy in Graham Greene’s Havana never existed.
Jim Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in pre-revolutionary Cuba. He is not an intelligence officer. He has no secret network and no important information to provide.
Then British intelligence recruits him.
Needing the money but lacking actual sources, Wormold begins inventing them. He fabricates agents, manufactures reports, and sends London increasingly elaborate intelligence—including drawings inspired by vacuum-cleaner parts that are interpreted as evidence of sinister military installations.
The absurdity is funny because the institution takes it seriously.
That is Greene’s real target.
Our Man in Havana is not primarily a satire of one incompetent spy. It is a satire of organizations supposedly devoted to discovering truth that become more interested in information that confirms what they already expect to find. Wormold’s inventions succeed because the bureaucracy receiving them wants them to be true.
And once an institution has invested its credibility in a fiction, correcting the fiction becomes more threatening than believing it.
Greene knew something about that world. His own experience in British intelligence gave the novel’s comedy a sharper edge: behind the jokes is a warning about secrecy, bureaucracy, incentives, and the enormous political consequences that can follow when governments mistake plausible stories for verified facts. The inventory identifies precisely this critique of intelligence culture, fabricated information, and institutional self-deception as the book’s central relevance to the collection.
The timing of this edition adds another remarkable layer. Onze Man in Havana appeared in 1959, just a year after Greene’s original novel—and at the very moment the Cuban Revolution was transforming the actual Havana in which his fictional intelligence farce had been set.
Wormold invents intelligence because he has nothing real to report. The frightening part is how eagerly power turns his inventions into reality.
Why It’s In The Collection
Onze Man in Havana belongs in Consigned to Darkness because governments do not need to deliberately lie in order to become dangerous.
Sometimes they only need systems that reward certainty more than doubt.
Greene’s intelligence officers are not conventional tyrants. Their failure is institutional. Information rises through a bureaucracy, acquires authority because official people repeat it, and eventually becomes difficult to challenge precisely because the institution has already acted as though it were true.
That makes the novel an unusually useful examination of the relationship between truth and government power.
Many books in the collection ask what happens when authorities conceal the truth. Greene asks something different: what happens when an institution becomes so confident in its own processes that it can no longer reliably distinguish truth from the fiction those processes have produced?
This Dutch first edition is a supporting rather than definitive bibliographical copy—the English first edition remains the collection’s long-term upgrade target. But it is a genuine first edition in its own national publication history, retaining its original priced jacket and preserving the novel’s introduction to Dutch readers only one year after its first appearance.
And because it appeared in 1959, this particular edition carries Greene’s fictional Havana into an especially striking historical moment: a Cold War satire about governments misunderstanding Cuba reaching new readers just as Cuba itself was becoming one of the central geopolitical problems governments would struggle to understand.
Greene’s joke is that the intelligence is fake. His warning is that once an institution believes it, the consequences become real.
Collection Categories: Publication-Event Object · Literature · Political History · Anti-Authoritarianism · War & Conflict · Cold War · Institutional Power · Espionage & Intelligence
———
Authentication Evidence
• Correct Dutch title page reading Onze Man in Havana by Graham Greene.
• Title page identifies Uitgeverij Contact, Amsterdam en Antwerpen, consistent with the original Dutch publication.
• Verso states the original English title, Our Man in Havana (1958), identifying this as the authorized Dutch translation.
• Copyright page records Translation Copyright 1959 by Contact, Amsterdam, establishing the first Dutch publication year.
• Translation credited to H. W. J. Schaap, consistent with the original Dutch edition.
• Original publisher's cloth binding with the correct blue stamped spine lettering and front-board decoration remains present.
• Original publisher's pictorial dust jacket survives.
• Dust jacket retains the printed publisher's price Geb. / 6.90, indicating an original priced jacket rather than a later replacement.
• Jacket typography, artwork, and publisher imprint are consistent throughout.
• No book-club indicators, later edition statements, or evidence of modern rebinding or restoration are observed.
• All observable bibliographic characteristics are consistent with the first Dutch edition, first printing.