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This artifact of Winston S. Churchill s preparation to publish the first volume of his Second World War memoirs is comprised of four pages, the first a 6 March 1948 typed letter signed by Churchill to his close friend, the publishing magnate Viscount Camrose. The remaining three pages, referenced and conveyed by the letter, are a three-page draft by Churchill s indispensable literary agent, Emery Reves, initialed by Churchill, to publishers of the forthcoming first volume of Churchill s war memoirs.The letter from Churchill to Camrose is typed on a single sheet of Churchill s watermarked, laid paper, Chartwell stationery. It begins "My dear Bill, Reves has sent me the enclosed which, like all his work, bears evidence of precise and careful thought." The letter proceeds to strongly endorse Reves s draft while also asking for Camrose s comments. The final sentence references a "talk that you and I and Brendan [Bracken] had…" Churchill s autograph valediction follows in two lines "Yours ever, | W." The three-page document from Reves is headed "Letter to the Publishers | DRAFT". On the final page of the document, there is note that "the second volume will probably not be published before the beginning of 1949." With an "x" beside it in the left margin and a corresponding "x" denoted note at the bottom of the document reading "I am sorry about this; but accept it." Beside this note, Churchill initialed in pencil "WC". The draft letter presents "the final title pages and preliminaries of the first volume as prepared and approved by Mr. Churchill, subject to full freedom of proof correction." The letter also announces that "The first volume s title has been finally fixed as The Gathering Storm ." Amid the four, numbered points made by Reves is the observation that use of the individual volume s subtitles, rather than the overall title of the work ("The Second World War") may serve to keep sales robust as successive volumes appear. Also interesting is the exhortation about content; even though "the volume is considerably larger than expected" it is explicitly stated that "we find that there is not one paragraph in the book which could be omitted." Not unrelated to the last point is acknowledgement of post-war scarcity in Britain: "…the binding cloth shortage in England will make it impossible… to publish it in two volumes."Condition of the letter is clean and complete with a single circular hole punched at the upper left for filing, a paper clip indentation and mild soiling adjacent to the hole, a pencil check mark at the upper right, and a pencil notation at the lower left that appears to say "replied 10 Mar 48". Condition of the three-page draft from Reves is near fine, the pages clean and complete with a single staple hole at the upper right.Although huge numbers of each volume of The Second World War were published in the U.S. and Great Britain, foreign language editions were by no means either incidental or few. We know of foreign editions in Arabic, Belgian, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish, among others. Perhaps no other figure played such an important - even vital - role in bringing the writings of Winston Churchill to a worldwide audience as did Emery Reves (1904-1981). Particularly in the critical years immediately preceding the Second World War, Reves succeeded in putting Churchill's relentless advocacy of democratic ideals before an incredibly diverse international audience. Per Churchill bibliographer Ronald Cohen, Reves was Churchill's "principal literary agent for foreign-language periodical contributions and, ultimately, for the foreign-language and North American editions of The Second World War and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in both volume and periodical form." It was "a profitable business relationship that grew over time into an enduring personal friendship. Seller Inventory # 008035
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