This Item Has Been Sold
STEP BY STEP
-Signed First English Edition Presentation Copy Inscribed to P.J. Grigg-
1939
First English Edition
Thornton Butterworth Ltd. [London]
Biblio: (Cohen A111.1.a) (Woods A45a)
8vo (365 pages, 2 maps, one folding, at rear)
Hardcover (with Dust Jacket) [Green cloth]
Item Number: 18746
Collector's Guide
Step by Step is a chilling anthology of Churchill’s prescient newspaper pieces about the rising Nazi threat, written for the Evening Standard and Daily Telegraph, commencing in 1936 with Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, through the final months before the declaration of war in 1939.
Description
This precious association copy of the First English Edition is signed and inscribed in ink to Churchill’s future Secretary of State for War, Percy James Grigg: ”To P.J. from Winston, June 29, 1939.”
During the last week of June 1939, Winston Churchill sent out to friends and colleagues fifty-four personal copies of STEP BY STEP, which was published on June 27. Almost exactly two months later, in the wake of Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Churchill was back in Chamberlain’s government as First Lord of the Admiralty.
This is a very good copy, in the rare and extremely perishable dust jacket; unclipped, darkened a bit with age, particularly along the spine, as per usual, somewhat rubbed with edge-chipping and a few short tears, else fine. The cloth spine has browned slightly, as have a few pages of the prelims, but the contents are otherwise immaculate.
SIR PERCY JAMES GRIGG (1890-1964) was Churchill’s Secretary of State for War, beginning in 1942, for the duration of World War II. Born to a modest West Country family, Grigg had risen swiftly through the civil service ranks. Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote of Grigg in his diaries: “Providence was indeed kind to me during the war to have placed P. J. Grigg at the helm of the WO…gifted with one of the quickest brains I have met…the more one saw of him the more one realized his sterling qualities of unflinching straightness.”