Ronald I. Cohen. Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill. 3 vols. London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2006. 2176 pp.; US $990.00 ISBN 0826472354.

Sir Winston Churchill's daughter Mary, now The Lady Soames, remembers her father as a writer and reveals, in a brief introduction to this

work, how her childish self "absorbed unconsciously the priority of my father's writing activities." Her mother later made sure she understood that Churchill supported their family by his pen; that their "domestic economy at certain periods survived precariously from article to article and book to book" (xi). Ronald I. Cohen's splendid bibliography deploys the evidence to demonstrate the diverse authorship of a journalist, a historian, and a political writer in the twentieth century. Churchill's memorable wartime speeches and his great polemical works are meticulously recorded, taking their place among the letters to editors, the dashed-off articles, and the works of other writers in which a Churchill contribution appeared. Together they build up a rich record of work in the literary, political, military, and other cultural spheres. Churchill's writings also reveal some of the relationships among those spheres, patterns which are often obscured by conventional academic and disciplinary boundaries. Both the passion of the collector and the tenacity of the scholar illuminate Cohen's meticulous bibliography. It is essential for Churchill scholarship, and it also provides a powerful sidelight into the global literary marketplace and the publishing practices of the years of Churchill's writing career and of his posthumous literary reputation.

The first of three volumes begins with tributes from the two people living who are most closely associated with Churchill, a foreword by the official biographer Sir Martin Gilbert and a brief introduction by The Lady Soames. Gilbert refers to his experience with the predecessors of Cohen's bibliography (those of Frederick Woods and Bernard Farmer) and he generously, if a little ruefully, acknowledges the value of documents that had eluded his own tenacious archival research but not that of Ronald Cohen. The bibliographer's own preface is modest, scholarly, and, when it comes to acknowledgements, generous in thanking the teachers, collectors, archivists, librarians, and friends who made it possible. Readers of the Papers/Cahiers will be particularly interested in the richness of Churchill knowledge among Canadian scholars, and the depth of the collections in Canadian libraries. Many will already know that Ronald Cohen is himself based in Canada.

Section A, which takes up all of volume I (1-1104) documents the works of which Churchill was the author--"all books, pamphlets and leaflets wholly or substantially written by Churchill, including the first such appearances in languages other than English, arranged chronologically by first publication date" (1). A1, dated 1898, will serve as an example. It is The Story of the Malakand Field Force, based on Churchill's dispatches to newspapers. The periodical appearances are cross-referenced to section C. A facsimile of the title page of the first (and only) state of the home issue of the first edition is followed by a full collation including the publisher's catalogue bound into the copies examined by Cohen. Next, a statement of typography and paper is admirably full. (Cohen notes in his preface the difficulty of using digital calipers to register the thickness of pages and the bulking of sheets.) Maps and plates are noted, and the colour of the binding is described ("moderate yellowish green," which is cross-referenced, in the "ISCC-NS Color-Name Charts" listed on xlv-xlvii, to that useful but inaccessible document's chip number 136). Under "publication," Cohen reports the print-runs and prices found in the archives of the publisher, Longmans; under "printing" he notes the involvement of Aberdeen University Press; three notes specify variations in protective tissues, the publisher's catalogue and the folding maps.

The annotations in this and other entries in section A tell the story of the book in the context of Churchill's literary career, and include excerpts from letters, contracts, and correspondence with Longmans and with the literary agent, A.P. Watt. Scholars interested in the collaborative, indeed familial, nature of literary work will find useful evidence in the participation of the author's mother and uncle in the enterprise; it was Lady Randolph Churchill who managed the negotiations for her son, who was stationed in India at the time; and it was she who arranged with her brother-in-law, Morton Frewen, to revise and correct the proofs. Scholars interested in the intervention of editors will find here and in later works how significant were Frewen's idiosyncrasies: the Athenaeum noted that the book was "ruined by the punctuation of an idiot or of a schoolboy in the lowest form" (12)--hardly an auspicious beginning for the career of a Nobel laureate.

The last three parts of the description of this initial work are translations (into Czech and Swedish); locations (Cohen's system of location abbreviations is usefully divided by country, with Canadian locations taking alphabetical precedence over those in the U.K. or U.S. as well as the ubiquitous "RIC," Cohen's own formidable collection); and finally reference (A1.1.a was A1(a) in Woods's bibliography; in the case of works unknown to Woods this part is absent). The concatenations of A1 extend to nine editions with the details provided under "annotations" in each case bringing the publishing history up to the 1920S.

In section A Cohen also distinguishes between the first appearance of a multi-volume work and its disaggregation into abridgements, many of which took on a life of their own as popular books. Another problem concerns the famous speeches; Woods had relegated many of the published collections to subordinate entries. The Canadian speech collection published by newspapers in Winnipeg, Regina and Saskatoon (A136, 1940), however, appeared before the volumes published by Cassell (A142, 1941). Further complexities, with the pamphlets of individual speeches, and with Cabinet memoranda and other documents, are discussed in the author's preface and handled with authority throughout the bibliography.

Volume 2 comprises four sections: B (contributions to books, pamphlets, leaflets, and portfolios), C (articles, book reviews, and news reports from war zones in serial publications), D (reports of speeches in books, pamphlets, and leaflets), and E (reports of speeches in serial publications). Here the broader history of book culture in the twentieth century is that of the periodical press. Churchill's contributions include not only his articles, but also the telegrams and letters sent from a reporter covering the field in situations during his early military life, and from a politician to his constituents and colleagues during his early political life. When Churchill became the wartime prime minister, his writings appeared regularly in newspapers around the world. Cohen has found over 1000 contributions to the periodical press previously undiscovered, but regards it as unlikely that he has seen them all.

Volume 3 records the published appearances of Churchill's letters, memoranda, statements, and other miscellaneous contributions. Section F is devoted to such contributions in book, pamphlet, or leaflet form. When the Ministry of National Defence published C.P. Stacey's Arms, Men and Governments in 1970 (F214), the book included four telegrams and other messages from Churchill to Mackenzie King and a 1943 memorandum to the British High Commissioner to Canada. Section G specifies the same sort of items found in periodical literature--notably Churchill's letters to editors. This final section is laid out in an innovative and helpful three-column format, with the identifying numbers and dates followed by the title of article and periodical, the dateline where appropriate, and the annotation and reference to publication elsewhere. Three messages to Canada or Canadians, first published in The Times in 1940-41, are recorded as G472, G492 and G573.

A bibliography is not a narrative history, still less a biography, but Cohen's book is laid out and indexed in such a way that readers can trace the threads of many narratives, personal, political, and military as well as literary. Churchill's own story is inseparable from the histories of the publishers and editors with whom he worked, whose interventions did so much to shape the way the statesman and historian's writings were read throughout his own long life, and how they are read by admirers and scholars today. Ronald Cohen's achievement is magnificent.

LESLIE HOWSAM

University of Windsor