The World Crisis: 1916-1918, Part I.
London: Thornton Butterworth Limited, 1927. First edition, first printing. Hardcover. This is a jacketed British first edition, first printing, of the third volume of Winston Churchill's monumental history of The First World War, quite elusive thus.
A quarter of a century before the Second World War endowed him with lasting fame, Winston Churchill played a uniquely critical, controversial, and varied role in the “War to end all wars”. Then, being Churchill, he wrote about it. The World Crisis was originally published in six volumes between 1923 and 1931, with the first four volumes spanning the war years 1911-1918 and the final two volumes covering the postwar years 1918-1928 (The Aftermath) and the Eastern theatre (The Eastern Front). The events of the 1916-1918 volumes, of which this is the first, include Churchill's time at the Front, his return to the Cabinet, and Armistice Day, marking the formal end of hostilities.
Jacketed copies of any World Crisis first editions are elusive. The 1916-1918 volumes present a special problem, as the paper used for the jackets proved particularly brittle, leading the surviving jackets to commonly split and fragment. This copy is an exception, approaching near fine condition in a good plus dust jacket. The blue cloth binding is square, clean, bright, and tight with vivid spine gilt, marred only by lower corner bumps and trivial wrinkling at the spine ends. The contents are crisp, with an unread feel, and no previous ownership marks. Spotting, endemic to the edition, is light, primarily confined to the pastedowns, first and final leaves, and page edges. We note a small gouge in the second blank endpaper and the facing half-title, and a larger, .25 x .5 hole near the top edge of the dedication page with the page oddly and irregularly thinned at the edges of the hole. Neither of these small flaws seem the result of erasure or adhesion; we suspect the book came thus from the binder. The dust jacket is a quite respectable example given the scarcity and fragility. We note only fractional losses along the top edge, the worst being a .25 inch strip loss at the spine head, and tiny losses at the spine heel. The few extant copies of this jacket we have encountered are often split at both hinges and both flap folds. This example is neatly split only along the front hinge, but with no appreciable chipping, so that the split is unobtrusive beneath the removable, archival quality clear cover.
In October 1911, aged 36, Winston Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. He entered the post with the brief to change war strategy and ensure the readiness of the world’s most powerful navy. He did both. Nonetheless, when Churchill advocated successfully for a naval campaign in the Dardanelles that ultimately proved disastrous, a convergence of factors sealed his political fate. Churchill was scapegoated and forced to resign, leaving the Admiralty in May 1915. Years later, Churchill’s wife, Clementine, recalled to Churchill’s official biographer “I thought he would never get over the Dardanelles; I thought he would die of grief.” (Gilbert, Vol. III, p.473)
By November, Churchill resigned even his nominal Cabinet posts to spend the rest of his political exile as a lieutenant colonel leading a battalion in the trenches at the Front. Before war's end, Churchill was exonerated by the Dardanelles Commission and rejoined the Government, foreshadowing the political isolation and restoration he would experience two decades later leading up to the Second World War. Despite Churchill's political recovery, the stigma of the Dardanelles lingered. Hence Churchill had more than just literary and financial compulsion to write his history.
Reference: Cohen A69.2(III-1).a, Woods/ICS A31(ab), Langworth p.105. Item #008271
Price: $1,900.00