My New York Misadventure by Winston Churchill: Rare Book of the Week

The only surviving copy of My New York Misadventure, Winston Churchill’s account of his near-death car collision in New York in December 1931, features in Peter Harrington’s new catalogue of books, manuscripts, ephemera, and personal items to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Britain's famous political leader.

Churchill was in New York earning money on a lecture tour after losing much of his wealth in the 1929 Stock Market Crash. He looked the wrong way on Fifth Avenue and was hit by a car and almost killed. While he recovered, he wrote an account of the experience, and allowed his doctor to print it as a leaflet (New York, reprinted by permission, Lenox Hill Hospital, 1932) to raise funds for the hospital where he was treated. Although it was printed in the Daily Mail newspaper in 1931 as an article and reprinted in the 1976 Collected Essays, this first and only separate eight page edition is the only known surviving copy.

The catalogue is formed around the major private Winston Churchill collections of Steve Forbes, chairman of Forbes Magazine, and Ronald I. Cohen, author of the three-volume Bibliography of the Writings of Winston Churchill. Other highlights include:

• an autograph letter signed from Randolph Churchill, paying the doctor for the birth of Winston Churchill 
• Mr Brodrick’s Army, one of the rarest of all Churchill’s books, published in a very small number when he was a new MP, warning of the danger of too large an army
• The Story of the Malakand Field Force, a very rare presentation copy from Churchill of his first book, inscribed to his valet Thomas Walden