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MY EARLY LIFE: A Roving Commission

-First English Edition in Dust Jacket-

1930

First English Edition (First Printing/Second State)

By: Winston S. Churchill

Thornton Butterworth Ltd. [London]

Biblio: (Cohen A91.1.b) (Woods A37a)

8vo (392 pages, with photo frontispiece, maps, plans, one folding map, 16 tipped-in illustrations)

Hardcover (with Dust Jacket) [Rough pink cloth]

Item Number: 205062

Collector's Guide

My Early LifeĀ is the only volume of personal memoirs that Churchill ever wrote. It is, arguably, his most entertaining book and an excellent entry point into his writing; a vivacious memoir of youth and wayward school boyhood. Published in the U.S. under the title A Roving Commission, the book has been endlessly re-issued in a variety of editions. True first editions, however, remain quite rare.

Description

The rarest of the rare: A First English edition in the astonishing dust jacket, here in stellar condition, complete, intact and virtually unfaded across the front and rear faces, nominally faded across the spine. There are fractional losses along the lower jacket edges and down the rear spine fold, as well as a small 1-inch square area of loss at the upper edge of the rear face. The book itself is virtually mint, bound in rough pink cloth that retains all of its glorious color. The binding is the Second State of the First Printing (per Cohen), with the variant five-line title block on the cover and the cancel-half-title listing the first volume of THE WORLD CRISIS, which was missing on First State half-title pages.

A prize.