Description
G. P. Putnam's Sons, Published 1940. Hardcover, x, 427 pp.; 24 cm; First Edition, preceding the 1942 second edition; illustrated with campaign maps and strategic diagrams.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Good condition, no dust jacket. Yellow cloth boards, black lettering on front board and spine. Mild to moderate shelf wear, nicking and fraying to cloth at corner tips and at head and foot of spine. Mild to moderate soiling overall, heavier along spine, with toning to spine. Binding tight. Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, dated Feb 5 '41 and signed with his first name alone, to Tom and Marian. Front pastedown carries the engraved armorial bookplate of Thomas Jewett Hallowell Jr. (1908-1989), the arms granted by the College of Arms, London, to Caleb Hallowell (1756-1829) of Abington, Pennsylvania, and laid over a companion card tracing eight generations of the family in America from 1649 to 1869. Hallowell's parents were Thomas Jewett Hallowell and Marion Slocum, so the presentation copy appears to have gone to them and descended to their son. Moderate toning to endpapers and pastedowns, mild toning to text block. Otherwise unmarked. Nickerson (1888-1965) took his degrees at Harvard, served in both world wars, and was Hilaire Belloc's American correspondent and protege from 1918, later marrying Belloc's secretary. His argument is that the mass conscript army born of the French Revolution was a hundred and fifty year aberration already in decline, and that smaller professional forces would decide the wars to come. He dedicates the book to Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, the British armoured warfare theorist. The preface is dated 7 October 1940, written as the Battle of Britain was under way, and uses the air raids then falling on London to argue that bombing disrupts civil life rather than destroying it. A second edition followed in 1942. Contents: War and Society; Pre-Democratic War; Mass War Begins; Mass Warfare Continues; Mass War Culminates; Mass War Collapses; Between Two Wars; The Descending Curve of War; Bibliography; Notes on Sources; Index.