2 volumes, octavo. Original red cloth, titles and gilt rules to spines, title and Marlborough crest gilt and blind rules to front boards. With the dust jackets. Housed in a custom red cloth solander box, with a set of the first US edition. First edition, first impression, one of only two known copies with the original dust jacket, and the earliest Churchill title thus issued.
Cohen, who had never seen a copy of the second volume in the dust jacket, suggests 6,250 as “a very close approximation of the number of copies sold … includ both the Macmillan and The Times Book Club issues. I have seen no information which would enable me to separate the number of copies in each issue”.
Churchill’s biography of his father was published on 2 January 1906 to “almost universal acclaim in the Press” (Churchill, Winston S. Churchill II) the Sunday Times remarking on Churchill’s “maturity of judgement, levelheadedness and discretion” and the Spectator praising his style: “He has chosen the grand manner … but the general effect is of dignity and ease.” Churchill also received plaudits from a number of well-known political biographers, J. A. Spender, biographer of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith, called it a “brilliant book”, and W. F. Monypenny, author of the Life of Disraeli, remarked that “alike in style and architecture and for its spirit, grasp and insight the book seems to me truly admirable”.
