Thank you so much. Indeed it was I, in my energetic Churchillian youth, when I pursued several lost causes (a big one in particular). Not a lost cause was discovering a stash of leftover sheets for the Collected Works at Hartnoll’s bindery in Cornwall. They did exquisite work, mainly Bibles. I had them bind several dozen sets, some vellum but more in morocco. To this day the morocco bindings fall open like well oiled door hinges, and the leather is still aromatic.

But certain individual cloth bindings, like the one you describe, were the work of my late friend and bookseller colleague Mark Weber. His binding of the Early Speeches made the rare and expensive original texts available again at modest prices. So Mark gets the credit for that one.

You encourage me to republish an old article, “The Sordid History of the Collected Works,” which is not entirely a pleasant story. It will be coming up soon on this website. For the nonce, my Connoisseur’s Guide is available through Amazon. It contains much of the Collected Works story—toward the back of the book (A279 in the Cohen Bibliography).

Thanks, Andrew, but the grand-daddy of all collections is Ron Cohen’s, much of which is now with the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, where my books and papers will all go as well. But most collectors would say the most elusive Churchill books of all are Mr. Brodrick’s Army (1903) and For Free Trade (1906)—cheap paperback collections of speeches, probably from a vanity press, which command stupendous prices. Even Ron managed to find only one of these. Fortunately they were replicated in the 1970s and these facsimile editions are commonly available.