WISHING YOU THE HAPPIEST OF HOLIDAYS!

We share with you a wartime Christmas gift from Clementine Churchill to her youngest child, Mary, who spent Christmas 1943 apart from her family, in London, manning a Hyde Park anti-aircraft battery as an officer in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. Her father had suffered a heart attack following the Casablanca Conference and was recuperating. Her mother had flown out to North Africa to nurse him. 

This beautiful, locally-produced, fine press edition of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is inscribed in ink on the front free endpaper: “For my darling Mary from Mummie, Christmas 1943.” The book is preserved in a stunning quarter-leather cloth clamshell solander.

The Hand and Flower Press was founded by Erica Marx at her home in Aldington, Kent in 1940. This book was the first production of the press, printed on handmade paper in a limited edition of 200 copies, of which this copy is number XXVIII. As the Colophon states: “This edition of The Turn of the Screw composed in Monotype Centaur to the design of Erica Marx was printed at the Western Printer’s Press at Bristol while the drawings by Mariette Lydis were reproduced by the Cotswold Publishing Company at Wotton-Under-Edge and finished under stress and difficulty during the warring months of July-September 1940.”