Books

London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915. Sevenpenny Library edition. Hardcover. This is the first state of the 1915 Hodder & Stoughton “Sevenpenny Library Edition” of Churchill's third book and only novel, extremely scarce thus in the strikingly illustrated dust jacket. This is an aesthetically pleasing little book measuring 6.625 inches tall by 4.5 inches wide (17 x 11.5 cm), bound in a decorated bright red embossed cloth, and with a frontispiece illustration. Worn and soiled copies are not uncommon, but since the edition was small, fragile, and printed on cheap paper, collector-worthy copies have become scarce. Scarcer still is the illustrated dust jacket, the front panel of which features a four-color reproduction of the frontispiece on a red background; in recent decades, we have seen only a tiny handful of copies ever offered on the world market and infer that precious few survive. In 1998, Richard Langworth (A Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill) wrote:…

A gripping story of Savrola, a resilient leader fighting for freedom in a turbulent revolution.