This Item Has Been Sold
THE WAR SPEECHES Leatherbound Presentation Set
-Signed and Inscribed by Winston Churchill to "Pug" Ismay
First English Edition Set
Cassell and Co. [London]
Biblio: (Cohen A142-A227 + 241 & 255.1) (Woods A66- A114 +124 &130)
8vo
Hardcover [Navy blue leather]
Item Number: 203499
Collector's Guide
Into Battle is the first volume of Winston Churchill’s collected World War II speeches (covering May 1938-November 9, 1940). Here are many of Churchill’s most notable oratorical flourishes of the war, including “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” “their finest hour,” and “never was so much owed by so many to so few.” Churchill’s speeches were collected and published yearly throughout the war beginning with this one in 1941. Into Battle was published in the U.S. and Canada under the title: Blood, Sweat and Tears. The U.S. (and Book-of-the-Month-Club) editions added four speeches that do not appear in the English edition, those of December 19 and 23, 1940 and January 9 and February 9, 1941.
Description
This extraordinary leatherbound Presentation set, is SIGNED and Inscribed by Winston Churchill in ink on the front free endpaper of the second volume, THE UNRELENTING STRUGGLE, to Churchill’s most important military aide during World War II, Major-General Hastings “Pug” Ismay: “To Sir Hastings Ismay (commonly called ‘The Pug’) from Winston S. Churchill. Christmas 1942.”
Also present, in addition to the seven war speech volumes, are two postwar speech compilations, THE SINEWS OF PEACE and IN THE BALANCE. The books are all First English editions, with the exception of INTO BATTLE, which is a later Impression, in very good condition. Each is uniformly rebound in crushed blue Morocco leather with gilt fore-edges and five raised spine bands in gilt-edged-compartments; Volumes I-IV bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, Volumes V-VIII by Truslove & Hanson of Sloane Street. The bindings are very lightly rubbed and/or scratched, with variable fading to all, and significant spotting to the leather of Volume VII, THE SECRET SESSION SPEECHES. The contents are fine, with light toning to some page edges.
HASTINGS ISMAY(1887-1965) was appointed Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1938, after a distinguished military career that had begun in India, where Ismay acknowledged Churchill’s early colonial war reportage as his powerful role model. When Churchill became Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, he chose Ismay as his chief staff officer. Ismay served Churchill as a critical intermediary to the Chiefs of Staff Committee and accompanied him everywhere throughout the war. According to John Colville, “Churchill owed more, and admitted that he owed more” to Ismay “than to anybody else, military or civilian, in the whole of the war.”