The Story of the Malakand Field Force, An Episode of Frontier War.
The extravagantly rare wraps (paperback) Colonial issue of the first edition, only printing, first state of Winston Churchill's first book
London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1898. Colonial Library issue of the First edition, only printing, first state. Wraps. This humble, battered, paperback is a collector’s chimera – the extravagantly rare “wraps” (paperback) Colonial issue of the first edition, only printing, first state of Winston Churchill’s first book.
Cased (hardcover) colonial issues were produced in small numbers simultaneously with the Home Issue. Lesser known is that the publisher also produced a paperback colonial issue. The survival rate for these is vanishingly small given the harsh climates and conditions of the colonies. Wraps colonial issues were bound in thin, blue-green covers printed in dark blue, with an elaborately bordered front cover designating it as the “Longmans’ Colonial Library” issue, printed at the bottom “This Edition is intended for circulation only in India and the British Colonies”.
There were no fewer than 10 different editions, printings, and binding variations for the very small number of Colonial issues ultimately produced from 1898 to 1901. Here, first state of the first edition is confirmed by inclusion of “L.” (for Leonard) in Churchill’s name on the title page and lack of an errata slip. Colonial provenance is unequivocal; a fancy purple ink-stamped banner on the front free endpaper reads “N.S.W. Book Stall Co. | Sole Proprietor | A.C. Rolandson.” The New South Wales company of Australian publisher and bookseller Alfred Cecil Rolandson (1865-1922) operated bookstalls in railway stations and elsewhere. Rolandson acquired the business in 1897, only months before Churchill’s book was published.
Rarity commends this copy, not condition – as expected given its inherent fragility and improbable survival. The wraps binding is substantially present, which already confounds the odds. The spine shows losses to the joints and spine extremities and vertical cracks. Nonetheless, all title, author, and publisher spine print is intact and legible. Equally surprising, the front cover, though soiled with various shallow perimeter losses, remains attached to the binding with all the dark blue print and illustration still intact. The rear cover likewise shows perimeter loss, though all of the extensive blue print is intact. The rear cover and adjacent final leaf (pp.335-6) are detached from the text block. The contents are complete, including the frontispiece and folding maps at pages 1 and 146. Intriguingly, a tissue guard is tipped in only at the p.146 map, consonant with bibliographer Ron Cohen’s notation about the first edition that “I have examined one copy with protective tissue over the second folding map only.” (Vol. I, A1.1.a, p.5) The contents are respectably bright, showing little age-toning. Expected spotting is moderate, appreciable only to the half title, title page and final leaves, and text block edges, otherwise only light and intermittent throughout. Lacking the protection of a hardcover binding, the fore edge corners of the first and final few dozen leaves are a bit dog-eared. The sole previous ownership marks are the aforementioned stamp, ostensibly from the original seller, above which is inked an apparent price notation.
Churchill had successfully applied his pen as a war correspondent - indeed the book is based on his dispatches to the Daily Telegraph and the Pioneer Mail – but this was his first book-length work. It was born of ambition and pique; he was vexed that his columns were published unsigned. On 25 October 1897 Churchill wrote to his mother: "...I had written them with the design... of bringing my personality before the electorate."
Churchill was twenty-three years old when this first printing was published, still two and a half years and several battlefields and books away from his first election to Parliament, where he would serve for nearly two-thirds of a century. He had yet to write most of the millions of stirring words that earned him his livelihood, his place in history, and, more than half a century after this first book was published, a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Reference: Cohen A1.2.b, Langworth p.17. Item #008269
Price: $7,500.00