India, the first edition, first printing, first binding state in the exceptionally scarce dust jacket.
London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1931. First edition, first printing. Hardcover. This elusive prize is the first edition, first printing, in the first variant of the quite scarce hardcover binding in the exceptionally rare dust jacket.
India is a collection of ten Churchill speeches, part of his campaign against the India Bill over which he broke with his party’s leadership. Though his cause was lost, these speeches arguably contain some of the finest examples of Churchill's rhetorical brilliance. The first edition is most common in orange paper wraps. A far smaller number were issued in hardcover bindings, of which there are two variants - one with the spine titled horizontally and one with the spine titled vertically. The horizontal spine title takes precedence and is scarcer. Hardcover first editions were issued in a striking orange dust jacket that ranks among the rarest dust jackets in the Churchill canon. As one might imagine, finding a jacketed first printing in the first binding variant is almost prohibitively challenging.
Here is one. This horizontally titled hardcover first printing is in very good plus condition. The striking orange cloth binding is strikingly bright, clean, and tight with no appreciable toning or soiling, sharp corners, and only the slightest shelf wear to extremities. The defect that prevents our grading this copy as truly “fine” is half a dozen tiny holes along the front hinge. We find no indications of insect damage; this defect appears to be the result of thin binding cloth and is consonant with similar defects we have observed on other hardcover copies. The contents are exceptional for the edition – clean and bright with a crisp feel, no previous ownership marks, and no spotting. We note a little shelf dust to the top edges of the text block. Differential toning to the endpapers corresponding to dust jacket flaps definitively confirms what the bright binding already testifies – that this copy has spent its life jacketed.
Mere presence of an India dust jacket eclipses typical condition considerations. Among the very few extant copies known, there are no “fine” examples. This copy is good plus. The rear face and flaps are beautifully bright and substantially complete, with only minor loss, primarily to the flap fold corners, and light wear and short closed tears to extremities. The spine is moderately but uniformly toned with minor losses confined to the spine ends. The front face is bright and only lightly soiled, but suffers a considerable loss at the upper edge – a roughly triangular shape spanning three inches at the top edge, extending to a point nearly two inches from the top edge, and claiming part of the “N” and “D” in the titular “INDIA”. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.
India is, in many ways, an archetypal work of Churchill’s “wilderness years” in the 1930s, which saw him out of power and out of favor, unable to leverage the policies to which he nonetheless applied himself with characteristic vigor and eloquence. Churchill spent formative time as a young 19th century cavalry officer fighting on the northwest Indian frontier, about which he would write his first published book. He certainly did not adopt an early, progressive attitude toward relinquishing the crown jewel of Britain's colonial empire. Nonetheless, it is instructive to remember that many of Churchill's dire warnings about Indian independence proved prophetic. Churchill had warned that too swift a British withdrawal from India would lead to bloody civil war and sectarian strife between Hindus and Muslims, Hindu domination, and destabilizing political balkanization of the subcontinent. All these predictions came to pass and, to a considerable extent, persist. India’s independence, achieved in 1947, was arguably history’s largest single act of political liberation. Independence also unfettered religious and communal strife that has lethally festered and flared ever since, claiming Gandhi himself in 1948.
Reference: Cohen A92.1.a, Woods/ICS A38(a), Langworth p.150. Item #008218
Price: $9,000.00