The Works of WSC
A guide to the Churchill canon
Articles
Affiliated sites
Savrola is intended first and foremost to be a pictorial website. For sets of books I generally attempt to show the shelf appearance of the set, both with and without jackets, and the front board. For individual volumes I show, where possible, six pictures. Front and spine in jacket, front and spine without jacket, back and spine in jacket, back and spine without jacket, title page and title page verso. In the majority of cases the title page verso contains most of the salient bibliographical publishing details. However, in a small number of cases the title page verso is blank, in which case I will substitute a photograph of a more useful page. I try to indicate these situations in the volume comments.
I would like to note that in many cases the books photographed have had their jackets protected by archival covers. Depending on the prevailing lighting conditions, and please keep in mind that I am by no stretch of the imagination a professional photographer, these jackets may have induced either distortion or reflection in the image. For these I apologise, but in many cases I am reluctant to remove that protective layer.
I also unashamedly solicit images to fill the many gaps which still remain. I realise that there are several sources, mainly booksellers, available on the web where some of these images may be obtained. I have made the conscious decision to refrain from that variety of piracy. However, if anyone cares to send images I will gladly use and attribute them. I can provide specifications as to final image size if required.
I hope that most of the informational fields are relatively self-explanatory and uncontroversial in nature. Included in that category I believe to be Publisher, Published, Format, Quantity Issued, Language, Country, Translator and Issue Price. However, other fields require a little clarification, if not justification, and those follow.
The Edition field is a combination of what is cited in the extant bibliographies and, in later cases, my own interpretation. Allocation of an edition designator can be challenging, particularly in the case of the translations. For example, when we talk about the 'First English Edition' it is generally clear that we are referring to the country, and not the language. Hence we refer also to American, Canadian and Australian editions, even though all are in the same language. Typically, however, this courtesy is not extended to translations. These tend to be incorrectly lumped together by language, ignoring the fact that languages, as with English, can be shared by several countries. For example, several of Churchill's works were translated into Spanish, both in Spain and in Argentina. In my designations I try to make clear the difference between a first Spanish and a first Argentinian edition. Likewise, for example, Portuguese is shared by Portugal and Brazil, French by France, Belgium and Switzerland, and German by Germany and Switzerland. Even this distinction between language and country does not solve all problems. The first German language edition of 'Great Contemporaries' was published in Holland by the same publisher who had produced the Dutch language edition a year earlier. So does that make 'Grosse Zeitenossen' the second Dutch edition rather than the first German edition? At this point the answer is that I honestly don't know. Logic says 'yes' but instinct says 'no'. All opinions are welcome. If you disagree with what you see please use the 'contact' link.
I have not been so ambitious with Savrola as to try to cover every impression of every edition. Life's too short and I'm too old for that. What I have tried to do is represent every impression where there is a significant difference in appearance. For ranges of impressions which do not differ I will show the range of which this particular volume is representative. In the comments field I will indicate which specific impression this volume is, although in most cases this will also be apparent from the title page verso image. OK. That's the theory of how it works. I'll just mention that the contents of this field have morphed from when I first built the underlying database, long before Savrola was a scrawl on a paper napkin. It needs work to make it fully accurate and again, if you see something specific, don't be shy to press 'contact'.
I am using what I regard as a simplified version of the sometimes wildly elaborate bibliographic notation. The following example is about as complex as I make it. (i) - xx, 1 - 385. This tells me that there is what will generally be a preface, or introduction, twenty pages long, numbered in Roman numerals. The presence of the brackets around page I indicate that it is not explicitly numbered but rather inferred by its placement. This section is followed by the main body of text whose pages are numbered 1 to 385. Brackets can appear around any of these numbers where the page number is inferred. I do not attempt to account for interpolated unnumbered pages, trailing blank pages, etc. Note that I have also made no attempt to account for the signature numbering and gathering used in the binding process. That pleasure I leave to the professionals.
Since bibliographers typically assign new numbers to any new edition in English, I have left the Woods number blank for any such work that post-dates Woods. However, in the case of translations, which tend to be assigned the number of their English counterpart (a major shortcoming in my opinion) I have allocated that same number to any subsequent appearance of that translation, whether it post-dates Woods or not. The Cohen numbers are currently mostly blank. However, with the long awaited release of the bibliography I anticipate this situation being rapidly corrected.
The notes are pretty much whatever's on my mind about a particular volume. As of this writing I am working to ensure that the list of contents for all speech and article volumes are listed here. Otherwise it's going to be snippets of opinion and interesting (I hope) little tidbits. At the risk of repetition - all input is welcome.
