The Postwar Speeches, a full set of jacketed first editions: The Sinews of Peace, Europe Unite, In the Balance, Stemming the Tide, and The Unwritten Alliance.
London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1948. First edition, only printing. Hardcover. This is a jacketed set of all five of Churchill's post-WWII speech volumes, increasingly challenging to assemble thus.
Both the volumes and jackets in this set vary from very good plus to near fine. All five cloth bindings are strikingly clean, tight, and square with bright spine gilt, and only incidental shelf wear. Four of the volumes retain sharp corners, with only Europe Unite‘s corners slightly bruised. The sole previous ownership mark is an illustrated bookplate affixed to the Stemming the Tide front pastedown. Spotting is modest, confined to the top edges of Stemming the Tide and the prelims and page edges of The Unwritten Alliance.
All five dust jackets are unclipped, retaining their original front flap prices, and complete, with no appreciable loss. Moreover, all five jackets are unfaded, with superior color and shelf presentation. We note only light wear to extremities, minor blemishes, and varying degrees of light soiling to the white rear panels. Stemming the Tide has the more desirable and elusive first state dust jacket. Dust jackets for the fifth and final volume, The Unwritten Alliance, were notoriously poorly printed, and consequently are almost always rubbed or streaked, with orange showing through the black background. This jacket has a vertical crease to the right side of the spine, but compensates with very little of the customary streaking. All five dust jackets are fitted with clear, removable, archival covers.
These volumes span the period from Demobilization in late 1945, when Churchill was Leader of the Opposition, through his second Premiership (1951-1955) into a time when Churchill passed "into a living national memorial" of the time he has lived and the Nation, Empire, and free world he has served.
The events encompassed by these years are in many ways no less dramatic than those of the war years – including the unraveling of the British Empire, the post-war recovery, the onset of the Cold War, Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb, development of the hydrogen bomb, and the beginning of the space age. Even at the waning of his life and career, Churchill met and framed these exceptional times with a singularly experienced voice. By the time Churchill's first postwar speeches volume was published, his oratorical prowess was unrivaled in public life. Churchill had a remarkable full half century of vigorous public speaking and dozens of published volumes to his credit. Before his final volume of postwar speeches was published, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, both for his books and "for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”
Among many noteworthy speeches in these volumes is Churchill’s "Iron Curtain" speech given at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946, where Churchill coined the phrase that described the division between the Soviet Union's sphere of influence and the West, incisively framing the Cold War that would dominate the second half of the twentieth century. There is also Churchill's 7 May 1948 speech to the Congress of Europe, which, along with other speeches, showed Churchill to be an early, ardent, and vital advocate of pan-European integration. And there is Churchill’s speech "The Twentieth Century - Its Promise and Its Realization," delivered in the spring of 1949 to an international conference tasked with exploring the socio-political implications of scientific progress. This speech is a tour de force survey of the period 1900-1945 that is both incisive and lyrical, humbling and inspiring.
These postwar speech volumes are scarcer than Churchill’s War Speeches volumes; all five of these books had only a single printing each. Also of note, the fifth and final volume, The Unwritten Alliance, is the last of Churchill's books published in his lifetime and was issued only in Britain, with no U.S. edition. Reference: Cohen A241.1, A246.1, A255.1, A264.1, A273; Woods/ICS A124(a), A128(a), A130(a), A137(a), A142; Langworth pages 184, 296, 301, 309, 338. Item #008253
Price: $2,000.00