Marlborough: His Life and Times, the publisher's signed limited and finely bound issue of the first edition, set number 105 of 150 numbered sets.
London: George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd., 1933. Signed and limited issue of the first edition. Full leather. This is a full set of the signed, limited, and finely bound first edition of Winston Churchill’s four-volume biography of his great ancestor, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough - among the most beautiful and desirable first editions in the Churchill canon.
Marlborough is the only one of Churchill’s many books for which the publisher issued a signed, limited, and finely bound first edition. These 150 numbered and signed sets had unique contents and bindings. Each volume was printed on thick, laid paper with untrimmed fore and bottom edges and gilt top edges, sumptuously bound by Leighton-Straker in reddish-orange Niger Morocco with raised and blind rule-bordered spine bands, the Marlborough arms in gilt on the front covers, orange and yellow head and tail bands, and marbled endpapers. Volume I of each set was signed by Churchill on the limitation page and hand-numbered. This set is hand-numbered “105” just above the author’s signature.
Condition of this set approaches very good overall, complete, sound, and unrestored, the various wear and blemishes strictly cosmetic. All four bindings remain square and tight. The bindings show variable spine toning, the first two lightly scuffed and soiled overall, including some abrasion to the corners. The Volume I spine also shows a little creasing to the upper center of the spine. The contents of all four volumes are respectably clean for the edition. We find no previous ownership marks. Spotting, endemic to the edition, is moderate, entirely absent from the third and fourth volumes, and substantially confined to the prelims and untrimmed fore and bottom edges of the first two volumes, with only mild, occasional intrusions into the blank inner margins. The final two leaves of Volume I show a crease to the lower fore edges. The untrimmed fore and bottom edges are clean apart from the aforementioned spotting and mild age-toning. The gilt top edges of all four volumes are only slightly dulled.
Marlborough was conceived a full 40 years before publication of the final volume. Churchill originally considered the idea of the biography in 1898, returning to it in earnest in 1928. Marlborough ultimately took 10 years of research and writing and is the most substantial published work of Churchill's "wilderness years" in the 1930s, which he spent politically isolated, often at odds with both his own party and prevailing public sentiment. Churchill passed into his sixties with his own future as uncertain as that of his nation. It is perhaps not incidental that Churchill’s great work of the 1930s was about a great ancestor. Churchill may have wondered more than once if the life history he was writing might ultimately eclipse his own.
The fourth and final volume of Marlborough was published one year before the outbreak of the Second World War and twenty months before Churchill became wartime prime minister. It has been said that "To understand the Churchill of the Second World War, the majestic blending of his commanding English with historical precedent, one has to read Marlborough.”
The work was well received. Two months after Volume I was published, T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” wrote to Churchill: “Marlborough has the big scene-painting, the informed pictures of men, the sober comment on political method, the humour, irony and understanding… discipline and strength: and great dignity. It is history, solemn and decorative.” Upon reading the proofs, James Lewis Garvin, editor of The Observer, wrote “I think it to be… the greatest of all your works… Your full brush has never had more mastery over space and colour…” When Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, it was partly for “mastery of historical and biographical description” on the strength of Marlborough, which was specifically cited and quoted by the Swedish Academy.
Reference: Cohen A97.1.a, Woods/ICS A40(a), Langworth p.168. Item #008185
Price: $9,750.00