Description
This is a beautiful set of the increasingly hard-to-find, and always tricky to confirm, authentic First American edition, in exceedingly fresh dust jackets that we can confirm are NOT correct First Edition jackets, but a variety of reprint and/or Book-of-the-Month Club jackets. Still, they look very good.
Volumes 2, 4, 5 appear to be BOMC with no flap price printed. Volume 6 is definitely BOMC with the club designation printed on the rear flap, thought the front flap, oddly, is price-clipped twice, top and bottom. Volume 1 is a 1970s-vintage reprint with a $19.95 printed flap price. Volume 3 is the lone First Edition jacket with a correct $6.00 flap price. It is also scuffed and darkened a bit along the spines, reflecting its true age.
Dizzying.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
-First American Edition Set in Later Dust Jackets-
1948-1953
First American Edition Set
By: Winston S. Churchill
Houghton Mifflin Company [Boston]
Biblio: (Cohen A240.3[I-VI]) (Woods A123aa)
8vo (Maps, diagrams and tables throughout.)
Hardcover without Dust Jacket [Red cloth]
Item Number: 213024
$850.00
Collector's Guide
The Second World War, also known as Winston Churchill’s War Memoirs, won Churchill the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953. Published in six volumes that appeared over six years, the books each came out first in the U.S. under the following titles: THE GATHERING STORM (Volume I/1948), THEIR FINEST HOUR (Volume II/1949), THE GRAND ALLIANCE (Volume III/1950), THE HINGE OF FATE (Volume IV/1950), CLOSING THE RING (Volume V/1951) and TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY (Volume VI/1953).
The ensuing English editions, issued within months of the American, contained numerous corrections and even a few additional maps. The English edition is therefore considered more definitive, though today the American edition may be rarer. The set was simultaneously published by the Book-of-the-Month-Club in America, printed on the same presses as the first editions, and thus can easily be confused with them. An excellent one-volume abridgment was published in 1959; largely the work of Churchill’s research assistant, Denis Kelly, though Churchill did contribute an interesting epilogue covering the years 1945-1957.
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Description
This is a beautiful set of the increasingly hard-to-find, and always tricky to confirm, authentic First American edition, in exceedingly fresh dust jackets that we can confirm are NOT correct First Edition jackets, but a variety of reprint and/or Book-of-the-Month Club jackets. Still, they look very good.
Volumes 2, 4, 5 appear to be BOMC with no flap price printed. Volume 6 is definitely BOMC with the club designation printed on the rear flap, thought the front flap, oddly, is price-clipped twice, top and bottom. Volume 1 is a 1970s-vintage reprint with a $19.95 printed flap price. Volume 3 is the lone First Edition jacket with a correct $6.00 flap price. It is also scuffed and darkened a bit along the spines, reflecting its true age.
Dizzying.
