Crusade in Europe. by EISENHOWER, Dwight D - 1948

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,, 1948. Octavo. Original light brown buckram over bevelled boards, spine lettered in gilt on black ground, facsimile signature to front cover in black, top edge gilt, others untrimmed. In the original card slipcase. 16 black and white plates from photographs (selected by Edward Steichen), 4 double-page maps, and 38 full-page maps to the text, map endpapers. Slipcase just a little worn and partially split but overall an excellent copy. First edition, the handsomely produced signed limited issue, number 633 of 1,426 copies signed by Eisenhower on the leaf that prints his D-Day message to the troops. Loosely inserted is a Western Union telegram from Eisenhower, dated 19 October 1959, to Stanley O. Styles, the Comptroller of Customs for New York, reading "I am more than grateful for your message of good wishes on my birthday anniversary. Thank you very much for thinking of me Dwight D Eisenhower". Styles had served as a representative of Mountain View, Passaic County, N. J., and as alternate delegate from New Jersey at the 1944 Republican National Convention. Crusade in Europe made Eisenhower a rich man, "becoming one of the most widely translated and sold books of all time. It is often compared to Grant's memoirs as a classic of military writing" (American National Biography); The New York Times considering that it gave "the reader true insight into the most difficult part of a commander's life."