Crusade in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower. First Edition, 1948. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1948.
You can view our first edition of Crusade in Europe here
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Octavo. Publisher’s deluxe presentation binding of full red morocco by Gaston Pilon (Garden City, NY), gilt banded spine, Eisenhower’s “flaming sword” motif in gilt and silver on front cover, top edges gilt, others untrimmed, map endpapers. 16 plates, numerous maps in the text. Spine just lightly sunned. An excellent copy.
First edition, one of 35 copies specially bound for presentation, generously inscribed by Eisenhower to the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and his wife: “For The Prime Minister of Great Britain and Mrs Atlee . With best wishes for a happy holiday season and a prosperous new year. From their friends Mamie D. and Dwight D. Eisenhower December, 1948”. Books inscribed by Eisenhower on behalf of himself and Mamie are most uncommon. Eisenhower has also signed at the foot of the facsimile of his famous D-Day Order of the Day.
This copy is number 31 of the edition of 1,426 copies. The unusual limitation suggests that 26 copies were originally planned for personal presentation, but in 1949 a number of US newspapers reprinted an interview with the binder, French-born Gaston Pilon, in which he stated that one of his prized possessions was a letter from Eisenhower thanking him for hand-binding “35 special, goatskin leather-covered volume” of this book.
Eisenhower’s account of his war is widely thought to be one of the finest American military biographies, the New York Times considering that it gave “the reader true insight into the most difficult part of a commander’s life.”
A most desirable copy, linking two wartime leaders: Attlee served as deputy prime minister under Churchill from February 1942 to May 1945, succeeding him as prime minister in July 1945, following the Labour landslide. Eisenhower would have been impressed with Attlee’s military record during the Great War, when he served as an officer in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and France; ODNB describing the War as providing Attlee “with a test of leadership which he grasped fully”.
