[CHURCHILL, WINSTON S.]. My Early Life: A Roving Commission. London: Thornton Butterworth Limited, 1934.
REPRINT. Signed by the author; cloth-bound; hardcover with dust jacket; octavo (22.5 x 14.5 x 4 cm); pp. 392. English text. Bound in publisher's cloth covers and supplied with the original unclipped dust jacket; half-title; 28 illustrations; rear index in double columns. Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner. Condition: VERY GOOD. Binding tight, secure, and square. Covers very well-preserved with some trivial spotting. Light toning to endpapers, with very few intermittent spots. Dust-jacket chipping to top of spine panel, tears with old tape repair to edge of upper panel, finger-marked. Scarce thus.
Notes: Keystone Library Edition, first impression, inscribed by Winston S. Churchill to the front endpaper, with a loosely inserted typed compliments note from Churchill on ‘Chartwell’ headed paper, loosely inserted publisher’s advertisement. This copy being inscribed to Arnold Foster: ‘To Arnold Foster, from Winston Churchill, July 1935’. Foster would later serve as a Sub-Lieutenant RNVR at D-Day, taking his LCT onto the Normandy beaches. However, Foster’s connection to Churchill in the 1930’s was very likely through the firm W.D. & H.O. Wills Tobacco Ltd. After Oxford, Foster worked for the Bristol company for many years. It was through the connection between Wills and Bristol University - where Churchill was chancellor from 1929 to 1965 - that the two most likely met. Bristol University named one of its most prestigious halls of residence after the tobacco company. And Wills, in turn, printed cigarette cards that featured Churchill’s face many times. Thus a rare signed and inscribed copy with the original dust jacket of perhaps Winston S. Churchill's most entertaining book, a memoir of youth and wayward school boyhood - in fact, the only volume of personal memoirs that Churchill ever wrote. The Keystone Library was Butterworth's budget imprint, reproducing first edition-replica volumes at affordable prices. The original, striking dust jacket, is unclipped with moderate wear. The binding, which is virtually a duplicate of the first English edition, is in excellent condition. Illustrated throughout with photo frontispiece, maps, plans, one folding map, and 16 tipped-in illustrations. [Cohen A91.3.b; Woods A37a].
