Beschreibung:

CHURCHILL, Winston S. For Free Trade. A Collection of Speeches Delivered at Manchester or in the House of Commons during the Fiscal controversy preceding the late General Election . London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1906.
CHURCHILL, Winston S. For Free Trade. A Collection of Speeches Delivered at Manchester or in the House of Commons during the Fiscal controversy preceding the late General Election . London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1906. 8 o . Half calf (lacking half-title; small tape stain on title-page). Provenance : Daily Mail (library stamp on verso of final leaf). FIRST EDITION. One of the two scarcest Churchill titles, Mr Brodrick's Army (1903) being the other. "In his Publisher's Note to the First American Edition, Dalton Newfield suggests that hardly more than a dozen copies of this volume exist" (Langworth, p.78). Both For Free Trade and Mr Brodrick's Army were issued by the same printer in identical format. Humphreys (1865-1946) was the manager of Hatchard's bookshop, and operated a vanity press out of its premises at 187 Piccadilly. Both titles may have been vanity publications intended by Churchill for distribution to fellow politicos, thus their great rarity. Churchill and his fellow Liberals triumphed in that 1906 General Election, which stands along with 1945 and 1997 on the list of historic Tory defeats. RARE. Only 6 copies have sold at auction in the last 40 years. Woods A9.