Step By Step, finely bound.
London: Thornton Butterworth, Ltd., 1939. First edition, first printing. Full leather. This is a finely bound British first edition, first printing of an important Churchill title - his last book published before the outbreak of the Second World War.
The half-leather green Morocco goatskin binding (deferential to the original green cloth) features a hubbed spine with blind-rule framed raised bands, twin, gilt-ruled, dark red title and author spine labels, and a gilt lion rampant in each unprinted spine compartment. The sides are green buckram with double blind ruled transitions. The contents are bound with green and red silk head and tail bands. The cloth of the original cover and spine is bound in at the rear.
Condition is near fine overall. The binding is square, clean, tight, and unfaded, with no discernible wear. Incidental blemishes seem inherent to the goatskin. The first printing contents are clean, with no previous ownership marks, no spotting, and modest age-toning. Only the page edges show any appreciable toning and soiling. Both maps are present and fully intact, the folding map following the text properly folded.
Step By Step includes 82 newspaper articles focused on foreign affairs written by Churchill between March 1936 and May 1939 at the end of his "wilderness years". Many of them, of course, contain his warnings and predictions about Nazi Germany. Step By Step was published in June 1939. Only a few short months later, on the first day of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Churchill had spent the better part of a decade politically isolated, frequently at odds with both his party and prevailing public sentiment. Now he was invited to join the War Cabinet, reprising his First World War role as First Lord of the Admiralty.
Less than a year after Step By Step was published, in May 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister. As a measure of Churchill's prescience and ultimate vindication, when Step by Step was published Labour leader Clement Attlee, a political opponent who would replace Churchill as Prime Minister in late July 1945, wrote to Churchill, "It must be a melancholy satisfaction to you to see how right you were." Others were even more blunt. Sir Desmond Morton, military officer, government official, and appeasement opponent, wrote to Churchill, "Many years on, historians will read this and your speeches in Arms and the Covenant. They will wonder but I doubt they will decide what devil of pride, unbelief, selfishness or sheer madness possessed the English people that they did not rise as one man" and "call on you to lead them."
Reference: Cohen A111.1.a, Woods/ICS A45(a.1), Langworth p.197. Item #008067
Price: $1,000.00