My Early Life & The Dream
South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2025. Subscribers' issue. Full leather. We are pleased to exclusively offer the finely bound, limited, and numbered subscribers’ issue of the St. Augustine’s Press edition of Winston S. Churchill’s My Early Life & The Dream.
My Early Life: A Roving Commission is arguably the most popular among Churchill’s many books. Never out of print since it first appeared in 1930, it has been translated into a score of languages and has charmed generations of readers. Perhaps no edition since the first is as compelling as this edition, coming from the same editor and publisher of 2020’s widely-praised edition of The River War.
This new edition of My Early Life is published as a sammelband with The Dream. On the eve of his 73rd birthday, Winston wrote this revealing essay about a ghostly reunion with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill. Winston recounts the world events that have transpired since his father’s death—without revealing his own role in them. In sharp contrast to My Early Life, The Dream was published posthumously and only in limited editions. Together, brilliantly and then poignantly, My Early Life & The Dream bookend what biographer Sir Martin Gilbert called the “remarkable and versatile life” of Winston Churchill.
As with the 2020 edition of The River War, by exclusive arrangement with the editor, publisher, and printer, Churchill Book Collector has produced a finely bound, limited, and numbered subscribers’ issue of this single-volume edition of My Early Life & The Dream.
This subscribers’ issue is limited to no more than 100 copies, each hand-bound by Felton Bookbinding Ltd. in full Morocco goatskin, the spine featuring raised, gilt-decorated bands framed by gilt rules, twin spine labels, the boards featuring beveled edges, gilt-ruled borders, and Churchill’s gilt-stamped facsimile signature on the front cover. The contents are sewn, bound with silk head and tail bands, all edges gilt, and marbled endpapers. The limitation page is hand-numbered and signed by the Editor. Each copy is housed in a matching cloth slipcase with Churchill’s gilt-stamped facsimile signature on the front cover.
This edition offers the most accurate and complete version of My Early Life. Text and illustrations are reproduced from the British first edition, with the editor pointing out where corrections, additions, deletions, and other changes were made over the years in subsequent editions.
Since My Early Life is now almost a century old, Professor James W. Muller, in consultation with the late Colonel Paul H. Courtenay of the Royal Sussex Regiment, who chaired the International Churchill Society in the United Kingdom, has added more than 1400 explanatory notes identifying terms, people, events, and references that may be unfamiliar to twenty-first century readers, as well as suggestions for further reading.
Unlike almost everything else he wrote, The Dream was not published in Churchill’s lifetime. This “Private Article,” as he styled it, first appeared a year after his death in the Sunday Telegraph, January 30, 1966. By permission of Churchill College, it is reprinted, with explanatory editorial notes, as a fitting epilogue to Churchill’s memoir.
This edition’s editor, James W. Muller, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, Chairman of the Board of Academic Advisers of the International Churchill Society, and a by-fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He edited the definitive edition of Churchill’s 1899 book The River War, published in two volumes by St. Augustine’s Press in 2020, and similar editions of two books Churchill published later in the 1930s, Thoughts and Adventures and Great Contemporaries, published in 2024 by Bloomsbury Books. Item #008134
Price: $975.00