Description
The author’s advance copies of the first printing of Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study In Command, inscribed by Douglas Southall Freeman to the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter S. Gifford.
Octavo, [three volumes], lvi, 773pp, [1]; xlv, 760pp; xlvi, 862pp, [map]. Black-gray cloth, title in gilt on spine. The first printings, with “Scribner’s A” on the copyright page of each volume. Some offsetting to endpapers, light dust remnant along top edge of text blocks. Internally clean, clear of marks or notations. Complete with numerous full-page plates, maps and battle plans. Includes a large fold-out map of “The Battlegrounds of the Army of Northern Virginia,” in Volume III. In publisher’s first state dust jackets, all price clipped (as expected with the author’s advanced copies). Tape repair to verso of Volume III, light sunning to spines, faint soiling, all very good examples.
(Nevins I, 30pp) (Dornbusch III, 1390) (Eicher, 971)
Volumes include Manassas to Malvern Hill (Volume I), Cedar Mountain to Chancellorsville (Volume II), Gettysburg to Appomattox (Volume III).
This set is signed on the front free endpaper of Volume I: “To Walter S. Gifford / with highest admiration / Douglas Southall Freeman.” Author’s note below inscription: “This is one of 100 advance copies of the first printing of the first edition – D.S.F.”
Douglas Southall Freeman (1886 – 1953) won the Pulitzer Prize for his four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee (1934). He considered this work, Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study In Command, to be his finest work.
The recipient of this copy, Walter Sherman Gifford (1885 – 1966) served as president of AT&T from 1925 to 1948, overseeing the company’s nationwide expansion, the strengthening of Bell Labs research, and the modernization of long-distance communication. In 1950, President Truman asked Gifford to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom (1950-1953).
