THE STORY OF THE MALAKAND FIELD FORCE 1899 WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

THE STORY OF THE MALAKAND FIELD FORCE 1899 WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

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[CHURCHILL, Winston Spencer]. The Story of the Malakand Field Force. An Episode of Frontier War. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899.

First edition thus. Cloth-bound. Hardcover. Small octavo (195 x 130 x 30 mm.). Pp. xvi, 337. English text. Bound in publisher's original plum buckram, spine lettered in gilt, broad single fillet panel to front cover, decorated endpapers. Initial and terminal blanks plus half-title present. Title-page vignette. Portrait frontispiece of Sir Bindon Blood (with tissue guard), 2 folding coloured maps, and 4 full-page. Printed at the Aberdeen University Press. Ownership signature to front free endpaper. Condition: VERY GOOD. Collated complete. Binding tight and secure with the hinges intact. Covers very well-preserved with just the faintest touch of bumping to spine ends. Interior largely fresh and clean. An unusually good copy and scarce thus.

Notes: First printing of the "Silver Library Edition", the second overall, of Churchill's first book first published the previous year, here much corrected and with a new preface. Issued in a print run of just 1,440 copies. Account based on his exploits with Sir Bindon Blood's Malakand Field Force on the north-west frontier of India in 1897, which Churchill accompanied as the Daily Telegraph's war correspondent. As Churchill was still in India, the checking of the proofs was undertaken "by an uncle of mine [Moreton Frewin], a very brilliant man and himself a ready writer. For some reason or other he missed many scores of misprints and made no attempt to organise the punctuation." This led to a some fairly severe comments, these however mixed with compliments: "The Athenæum said 'Pages of Napier punctuated by a mad printer's reader'" (My Early Life). One reader unstinting in his praise was the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, who called Churchill for a personal interview and expressed his "admiration not only for its matter but for its style" and thought it a "truer picture" of events than any other documents he had read. The reception of Malakand was key in convincing Churchill that he could live by the pen, as well as by the sword. Cohen A1.3.a; Woods A1(b).